There are plenty of perfectly good reasons for printing something in color, but is is really necessary to print in color? Grayscale printing is high quality enough that black and white printing most of the time would suffice, so why would you print in color?

Have you ever asked yourself that question? Why do you print in color? When printing something do you ever wonder, does this need to be printed in color? Do you print in color because the original version was in color? Perhaps it is easier to read in color. Maybe you like the way that color printing looks. It's usually easier on the eyes.

So there are plenty of reasons that people print in color instead of black and white, but what happens if you print more in black and white? I would argue that you would save a lot of ink by printing in black and white.

You see, most printers separate the black ink from the rest of the colors because people print a lot of black text. Thus, it is more efficient to have black have its own dedicated ink. However, what about the colors? How do they work?

Well, do you remember art class when you were taught to combine red and blue to make green? Or how you make orange by mixing yellow and red? Your printer works very much the same way.

Most printers use some combination of red, blue, and yellow ink to create different colors. Thus, to create the different colors it mixes them together on the different pixels until it gets just the right color. So, to create different colors you might use twice as much ink than you would to create the same effect in grayscale printing.

Speaking of grayscale printing, in contrast to color printing grayscale provides a very interesting benefit. Since the printer is just using different amounts of black for each pixel, on lighter colors it uses less black. That adds up to a large potential ink savings just by printing in grayscale.

If you print only in black and white, you will end up using more black ink than color ink, but that's the beauty of this idea. Black ink is usually cheaper than color ink. Depending on the manufacturer, it can be ten to thirty percent cheaper.

In short, your color printing is costing you money and you might not even know it. Next time you want to print something, ask yourself, do I really need to print this in color? If the answer is no, then save yourself the money and print grayscale.