I print in black only, so why do the colour cartridges keep running out?

Q  I have a HP Photosmart 8250 printer with one black and five colour ink cartridges. Despite printing documents only in black, I seem to have to replace the colour cartridges at regular intervals, which makes it expensive to run. Should this be happening?
Graham Best

A  If the documents you’re printing consist of black text on a white background, then the printer should be using only the black ink cartridge. If, however, you also print any shade of grey, then the HP Photosmart 8250 printer driver uses the colour inks (cyan, magenta, yellow, light magenta and light cyan) to create shades that are smoother than those possible using black ink alone.

You might, for instance, be printing black text via a desktop-publishing (DTP) application that also includes a small amount of one or more other colours. This is common for CMYK printing, for example. However, without knowing more about your PC’s software setup, it is impossible for us to say.

Regardless, one way to guarantee that the printer is only using black ink is to make a change in its driver. Open the HP Photosmart 8200 Series Printing Preferences from the Start menu and look on its Color tab for Color Options.

Here, enable ‘Print in Grayscale’ and ‘Black Only’ to print everything using black ink, and nothing else. Note, though, that the ‘Black Only’ option will need to be disabled when you next want to print in colour.

If these ideas don’t solve the ink-use problem, then consider how often you use the printer. If it isn’t very often, then the printer will need to clean its print heads each time it warms up for printing, to remove any dried, encrusted ink.

All six print heads are flushed with ink as part of this, and this does waste ink. Finally, inkjet printers tend only to be expensive to run when used with the manufacturer’s own ink cartridges.

A full set of six compatible Photosmart 8250 ink cartridges, for example, can be bought for less than the price of one HP own-brand cartridge – but obviously, the manufacturer would advise against their use.