Why is all the text gray in Windoze?

[PenguinLust]

Can someone please help me understand why my printer always prints gray text in Windoze but is able to do black in Linux? I e-mailed Canon support for help, but their answer seems completely non sequitur. So do I need to e-mail them back to straighten them out or could one of you straighten me out, because one of us has severely misunderstood the other.
Here's what I sent them:

For some reason, when I print in Windows via the wireless LAN, the text always comes out gray. I've been able to do this w/Notepad and MS-Word, so I doubt it's the software. When I select print, I make sure all that all the "print in grayscale" checkboxes are turned off in the driver dialogues, so it's not that. It seems that the driver I'm using (the latest) is causing the gray text. When I print in Linux (via USB) it prints black text.

Now this is what they had to say:

Thank you for your E-mail inquiry regarding your PIXMA MG6120.

When Grayscale Printing is enabled in the printer driver window, the printer will combine the color ink tanks to print black. This is not true black. This is composite black.

The printer automatically uses the PGI-225BK ink tank for printing text documents and the CLI-226BK ink tank for printing photos. We recommend replacing the ink tanks when they are empty. Leaving empty ink tanks inside the printer may damage the print head by clogging it.

The printer driver does not contain settings for using the PGI-225BK ink tank only. Our apologies are extended to you for any inconvenience.

It looks like they had a computer respond that completely fails the Turing test.

 

[Fuse]

On your windows machine in MS Word, highlight the text and then click the button to change the colour of the text. To print true black, you need to select "Automatic" black.

If that doesn't work, the only other thing I can think of is that you have the printer settings set to draft quality. Have a look to see if you can change it to best or standard quality.

 

[The Hat]

To print good black text in the Windows O/S just set your printer to Standard Print quality then click the greyscale box and you’re done..

 

[PenguinLust]

So you're saying I select grayscale to make it black?
I'll check when I go home, but I think "Standard" is the default.
I also notice that you've selected the rear paper tray. I have it take from underneath. Does that make a difference?

Ya know, it's funny, but Linux users used to shy away from Canon because of inferior support to HP. But now the Linux printing seems to be better than the Windoze printing!

 

[The Hat]

The paper feed position is optional on the 4700 but you can use the paper feed cartridge instead..

 

[stratman]

So you're saying I select grayscale to make it black?

Greyscale is used to print color as black and white.

As forum member @Fuse posted, select Standard or High for best printing in either color or black and white. The setting Fast is a draft mode and may result in less intense blacks and colors.

Set Color/Intensity to Auto as seen in The Hats posted image. If this does not work then you can set this to Manual and adjust the sliders to see if you get better quality print.

What brand ink are you using?

 

[PeterBJ]

If the printer works well under Linux but not under Windows, then either the printer isn't installed properly or much more likely some setting in the printer driver is wrong.

I made a simple document with both black text and coloured rectangles in MS word, and printed it using various settings on a Canon MP540. Here is a scan of the print outs, joined into one image, click to enlarge:



The top third is printed using the standard settings as shown in the picture uploaded by The Hat, but with the greyscale printing unchecked. Checking greyscale printing doesn't affect the black, but turns the colours into various shades of grey, as stated by stratman.

The middle section is printed with the quality setting changed from standard to fast. It is seen the print is lighter, but is fully acceptable for non-important documents IMO. The bonus of this setting is higher printing speed and lower ink consumption.

To get the pale print at the bottom I left the quality setting at fast and changed the Colour/Intentensity to manual and clicked set. This opens this window, click to enlarge:



Moving the Intensity slider all the way to the left and clicking OK produced the pale print with grey text instead of black. Note that the image of the pencils show the effect of moving the sliders.

 

[PenguinLust]

Ok, I tried printing w/the "Standard" quality (which is does by default) and "Grayscale Printing". It changed nothing. I also tried print w/the "High" quality. It changed nothing. I tried a bunch of other things, (including printing from an XP vm) but eventually my brilliant wife was able to reproduce the conditions under which she insisted that she was able to get black text. The settings follow.

There were other problems w/the result that are unacceptable (probably in connection w/the "Print Paper Size") but at least it finally did black! So does that give any clue as to what's going on?
BTW, one reason I'm concerned is that I don't want it to be spending the expensive gray ink. I just want it to use the text black. Do you think it's using gray ink or just using the text ink sparingly?

 

[stratman]

The following is for a different cartridge type but AFAIK still applies to your cartridges:

PGI-5 Pigment Black Ink is used ONLY For:
- Plain Paper Test (monochrome and grey scale)
- Envelopes
- Transparencies
- Duplex Printing On Plain Paper
- Camera Direct Printing on Plain Paper

CLI-8 Dye-Based Color Inks are used anytime color is printed and is used exclusively for:
- All Photo Paper types (including when Duplex printing)
- High Resolution Paper
- T-shirt Transfers
- CD-R's
- All Borderless Printing, on both PhotoPaper and Plain Paper

So, setting paper to Photopaper Plus Glossy II will use all the colors except Pigment Black.

Make sure you are not using an ICC profile other than the default Canon ICC profile. If you don't know what that means then you probably are not.

Also, try uninstalling and reinstalling the Canon software with the latest drivers (or rollback to an older version if this problem occurred after updating the firmware or drivers).

 

[PenguinLust]

Doh! At least it usually prints black in Linux. I printed out something in Kate that came out black, and I guess the usual black results I get come from printing out of the OpenOffice word processor, but I just printed a PDF out of Okular and the text was gray again!
Yes, I suppose the photopaper forced it to use the photo black, so that's an awfully poor solution. No, I don't know what ICC is but I do use the latest drivers.