The arrival of the internet first and then of tablets has had a very positive effect in the sense that paper consumption has been greatly reduced. However, there are still businesses that need a printer to operate. This is because it gives some people more security to have the physical document in their hands. Well they all have the same problem, not being able to print in black if we stop having colored ink. What does it talk about?
The business model of printers is well known, selling the main unit at a very low price and then doing so with the spare parts at a premium. For some time, in some models, it has been impossible to buy cartridges that have in their tanks the four inks of the CMYK standard, acronyms that belong to cyan, magenta, yellow and black. What are the basic colors in the print world that are analogous to RGB on monitors. However, printer manufacturers have come up with a trick that makes black printing a nightmare.
Why can’t I print in black?
The vast majority of documents that come out of our printer are monochrome, more than anything due to the fact that most of them do not have the ability to print in color with sufficient definition and today there is less expensive to send our images online than to print a color photo or with a type of paper that supports a good definition of dots per inch.
However, make the law, make the trap. Since then, many printer manufacturers have decided to make it difficult to print black on their printers. And yeah we know that’s not something new and they’ve been doing it for years but when you have to print a document it’s annoying how the document instead of doing it in monochrome starts to do it in color. The explanation? to this phenomenon, because it is very simple and comes under color theory.
The combination of magenta, cyan and yellow gives us black accordingly. Therefore, only the three inks are needed at the same time to generate it. What does this translate to? Easy, why are we going to place a fourth black ink tank if we can combine the three existing ones? Also, since it is the most used ink, the ink cartridge has a shorter lifespan and needs to be replaced sooner, being part of the manufacturers’ business model.
That is why before buying a new printer it is extremely important to take a look at its spare parts and if we are going to use it to print documents, make sure that we can at least buy a cartridge of black ink. However, it can also happen that the deposit runs out, in which case the printer driver will command to combine the other three colorants and if there is not enough of one of the base colors, it will print. It’s easy to understand, only one or two of the colors will not be available.
