Why does a printer not work if color ink is missing?

The arrival of the internet first and tablets later have had a very large positive effect in the sense that paper consumption has been greatly reduced. However, there are still businesses that require a printer to function. This is due to the fact that it gives more security for certain people to have the physical document in their hands. Well, they all have the same problem, not being able to print in black if we stop having colored ink . What is this about?

The business model of printers is well known, selling the main unit very cheaply and then doing it with the spare parts at a premium. For quite some time, in certain models it is impossible to buy cartridges that have in their tanks the four inks of the CMYK standard, acronyms that belong to cyan, magenta, yellow and black. Which are the basic colors in the world of printing and are analogous to RGB in monitors. However, printer manufacturers have found a dirty trick that makes printing black a nightmare.

Why does a printer not work if color ink is missing

Why can’t I print in black?

The vast majority of documents that come out of our printer are monochrome, more than anything due to the fact that most of them do not have the capacity to print in color with sufficient definition and today it is cheaper to send our images online than to print them. color photo or with a type of paper that supports a good definition of dots per inch.

However, made the law, made the trap. Since many printer manufacturers have decided to make it difficult to print black on their printers. And yes, we know that it is not something recent and they have been doing it for years, but when you have to print a document it is annoying to see how suddenly the document instead of doing it in monochrome begins to do it in color. The explanation? to this phenomenon, because it is very simple and has to do with color theory.

Teoría Color CMYK Combining magenta, cyan, and yellow gives us black . Therefore, only the three inks are necessary at the same time to generate it. What does this translate to? Easy, why are we going to place a fourth tank with black ink if we can combine the other three existing ones? In addition, because it is the most used ink, it makes the ink cartridge have a shorter life and has to be replaced sooner, forming part of the manufacturers’ business model.

That is why before buying a new printer it is extremely important to take a look at its spare parts and if we are going to use it to print documents, make sure that we can at least buy a black ink cartridge. However, it can also happen that the deposit has run out, in which case the printer driver will order the other three dyes to be combined and if there is not enough of one of the basic colors it will print. It’s easy to understand, just one or two of the colors will not be available.