Force the printer to print in black and white only

It may happen that the laser printer in our office or the inkjet printer runs out of ink in the best color with the final result of obtaining faded or poor prints. You can therefore only print in black and white, but this is not as obvious as you might think. In fact, if you ask for a black and white print but also use the color cartridge that has run out, it won’t work.

We must therefore learn to print in black and whitewhether from a Windows PC, a Mac or a smartphone, using only the black cartridge, thus avoiding having to leave work due to the cyan cartridge or the color cartridge suddenly being empty.

READ ALSO -> Guide to buying a printer: laser or ink?

1) Print in black and white on Windows

On Windows we can print in black and white by directly setting the printer in use, so as to “force” the use of the black cartridge and ignore the use of color cartridges; in this way any program we use will print in black and white without distinction.

To make the change, open the Start menu at the bottom left and go up Settings > Bluetooth devices > Printers and scanners (on Windows 10 and Windows 11). On the page that appears, click on the printer we want to use and scroll down until we find it Printing preferences; from here let’s move to the tab Paper/Quality and we activate the voice Monochrome.

Alternatively we can always open the Control Panel from the Start menu, by pressing on the category Hardware and soundsby clicking on Devices and printersright-clicking on the printer to configure and finally pressing on Printing preferences.

3) Print in black and white from programs

If we don’t want black and white printing to affect all the programs on our computer, we can also apply this change to the individual software we use; Below we have collected the procedures for printing in black and white on Microsoft Word, Adobe Acrobat Reader, LibreOffice Writer, Microsoft Edge and Google Chrome.

To print in black and white on Microsoft Word (or any other program in the Office suite) simply click on the top menu Fileselect the menu Presshighlight the printer to use and finally select the item Printer propertiesso as to open the printing configuration menu of the operating system in use.

To make a black and white print on Google Chrome (the most used web browser on PC), we press the now well-known shortcut on the keyboard CTRL+P and, in the print window that will appear in the center of the screen, make sure that our printer is selected in the field Destination so let’s choose the voice In black and white from the drop-down menu next to the item Coloured.

To print in black and white on Adobe Acrobat Reader we use the keyboard shortcut CTRL+P or let’s take it to the menu File -> Printlet’s make sure our printer is present in the field Printer then we put the check mark on the item Printing in grayscale (black and white)present immediately below the button Property.

To start black and white printing on LibreOffice Writer (and on any other program of the suite open source), we use the shortcut CTRL+P or let’s take you on the journey File -> Printselect the printer to use from the list shown and click on the button Propertyso as to open the configuration screen of the operating system in use.

To proceed with black and white printing on Microsoft Edge (the browser integrated into Windows), we press on the keyboard CTRL+P and, in the window that appears, we check if our printer is present at the top of the page then scroll until we find the item Other settingsfrom which we can set black and white printing.

2) Print in black and white on Mac

If we use an iMac or a MacBook to create or view documents, we can print them in black and white very easily by opening the document with the specific program and using the keyboard shortcut CMD+P (alternatively we can always open the menu File up and use your voice Press).

In the new window that appears, set the printer to print with in the drop-down menu next to the item Printer and place a check mark on the item Black and whitepresent next to the field Copy.

By starting the printing process, the Mac in our possession will print in black and white; if we don’t see the button appear Black and white in the print window, click at the bottom Show detailswe select the item Supports and quality and we activate grayscale support, so we can print correctly in black and white.

4) Print in black and white on your smartphone or tablet

If we want to create the black and white print from our smartphone or tablet, just follow the simple steps described below, making sure you have already configured the printer on your mobile devices.

To print in black and white from Android we open the app menu (the three dots or three horizontal lines), select the Share button and press the button Press (On some apps the print button may be available as a separate item.)

In the screen that appears we expand the upper section by tapping on the arrowhead pointing downwards, then set Black and white in the drop-down menu under the item Coloured.

To print in black and white from your iPhone or iPad let’s tap on the button Share (in the shape of an arrow inside a square) and press the button Press; in the new screen we select the printer to use in the field Printerthen we activate the voice Black and white which will appear among the options.

5) Force printing even without colors

Many modern printers no longer print if the color cartridge is empty; even if we can still print in black and white on paper, these printers force users to purchase a new color cartridge in order to continue printing.

Below we have collected information from printer manufacturers regarding printing with one or more empty cartridges:

• EPSON
• HP
• Brother
• CANON

The possibilities also vary based on the model or type of cartridge used for printing: some models continue to print even without colors, while others want all the cartridges to be present and charged in order to continue the printing process (due to the structure of the print head, which could dry out and break if it is not permanently impregnated with ink ).

The advice in this case is to always print the documents with a monochrome laser printer (even small ones) and Use the inkjet printer only for documents with graphics and drawings.

For further information we can read the guide above what are the fastest printers (high PPM).

Conclusions

If the color ink has run out or we want to print a large quantity of sheets it is preferable to print our documents in black and whiteso as to obtain a high printing speed while losing very little detail (especially if the documents contain a lot of text).

If we are looking for a way to save further on printer cartridges, we can continue reading our article on how Save ink and printer cartridges.