General color ink depletion question

[fdm2000]

Somewhat of a novice when it comes to printer operation. Using a Canon MG6821 with CLI 271 color carts and wonder why these carts are needing refill or replacement often when I exclusively choose the standard grayscale print selection when printing and almost never use color printing.
Is the humming noise I hear frequently before or after a print a short clean operation that is utilizing all inks ink or is grayscale printing using color during printing?

Perhaps a dumb question but just wondering.

Frank

 

[The Hat]

@fdm2000, just because you exclusively use greyscale really means nothing to your printer, because it will use up your colour inks anyway in two separate ways.

It depends on what type of paper you choose to print on, and what application you use to print from, that determines which inks your printer will use, but regardless of this, the printer will still use some of the colour inks to keep the print head in good condition.

If any of your colour ink cartridges go empty, then you printer will refuse to print anything, greyscale or otherwise, you must keep ink in all the cartridges for the printer to function, that’s the nature of the beast...

 

[Ink stained Fingers]

cleaning cycles will use up all inks over some time, and it depends on driver settings whether the printer solely use the pigment black ink, it depends on the paper selection and options like borderless printing or duplex , so yes, all inks will be used up over time one way or the other - or both ways - by cleaning and/or printing

 

[PeterBJ]

I just made a test using a Canon MG5450 that I think is somewhat similar to the MG6821. Using both plain paper setting and photo paper setting I selected greyscale in the printer settings and printed this test image twice on the same sheet of plain paper, here is a 50 dpi scan:

Here is the baby from the red marking crop scanned at 600 dpi:

And the crop marked in red scanned at 2400 dpi:

It can be seen that even if greyscale is selected the printer uses all colours to create grey. This explains why all inks are used and also explains why there can be problems with colour cast in a B/W photo print using a normal home use inkjet printer.

When photo paper was selected the image printed darker on the plain paper, but the coloured dots from all colours were similar.

The scanner used is an Epson Perfection V33 CCD scanner.

 

[techsavvy]

inkjet printers will use all the colors even if you only print in black. This article will explain it: https:// Edit: by Moderator
Also, Canon inkjets seem to do a lot of head cleanings.