Printer Settings Explained: Grayscale vs Monochrome, Draft vs Best, and What Actually Saves Ink
Last Updated:Quick answer: grayscale means shades of grey — and on most inkjets it still mixes cyan, magenta and yellow to make those greys, so it does not save colour ink unless you also tick the option called Black ink only or Print in grayscale: Black ink only. Monochrome means a single ink with no shades at all. And Draft or Fast Economy quality is the setting that actually reduces ink volume per page. The two changes worth making today: switch everyday documents to Draft, and find the black-ink-only checkbox in your driver.
Printer settings are full of words that sound interchangeable and are not. The gap between them is worth real money — choosing the wrong one on a printer you use daily can double what you spend on cartridges over a year. Here is what each setting actually does, where to find it on each brand, and which ones are worth changing.
Grayscale, monochrome and black-and-white are three different things
| Term | What it means | What your printer does |
|---|---|---|
| Grayscale | A full range of grey tones, from white through to black | On an inkjet, often blends colour inks with black to produce neutral greys. Uses colour ink unless you tell it not to. |
| Monochrome | One colour only. Strictly, no tonal range at all — though most manufacturers use it loosely to mean "black only" | Black cartridge only. On a mono laser it is the only option the machine has. |
| Pure black and white | Every pixel is either black or white, no greys | Sharpest text, smallest ink use, terrible for photos |
| Black ink only | The setting you usually actually want | Grey tones rendered by varying black ink density alone. No colour ink is touched. |
The distinction that matters most: selecting "Grayscale" in a print dialog on an inkjet does not necessarily stop the colour cartridges being used. Many inkjet drivers produce a richer, more neutral grey by adding small amounts of cyan, magenta and yellow — a "composite black". You get a better-looking page and you keep draining colour ink on documents that contain no colour. If your goal is to make the colour cartridges last, the checkbox you need is the one that specifically says black ink only.
If your printing is overwhelmingly text, the deeper fix is hardware rather than settings — our guide to what a monochrome printer is covers when a mono laser makes more sense than an inkjet.
Where the black-ink-only setting lives, by brand
- HP — Printer Properties > Paper/Quality > Print in Grayscale > Black Ink Only. In HP Smart, look under Print settings > Color. Some models label it Black & White (Black ink only).
- Canon — Printer Properties > Main > Grayscale Printing. On PIXMA models this generally does mean black ink only, though photo-black-equipped models may still use the photo black tank.
- Epson — Printer Properties > Main > Grayscale or Black/Grayscale. On EcoTank and WorkForce models the checkbox may appear as Grayscale under Advanced settings.
- Brother — Printing Preferences > Basic > Colour / Mono, set to Mono. Brother is the most straightforward of the four here.
Set it in the driver's defaults rather than in each print dialog, and it applies to everything from then on. On Windows: Settings > Printers & scanners > your printer > Printing preferences. On Mac, the print dialog remembers per-app presets — save one and name it something obvious like "Everyday mono draft".
Quality settings: what Draft, Normal and Best actually change
The quality dropdown is where the real ink saving is. It controls two things: how much ink goes on the page, and how many passes the printhead makes.
| Setting (names vary) | What changes | Use it for |
|---|---|---|
| Draft / Fast / Fast Economy / EconoMode | Fewer nozzle firings per area, single pass, lighter coverage | Internal documents, reference copies, anything you will read once |
| Normal / Standard | The balanced default | Letters, forms, anything leaving the building |
| Best / High / Photo | More passes, heavier ink laydown, slower | Photos, presentations, anything on coated paper |
| Maximum dpi | Highest resolution the hardware supports; substantially more ink and time | Photo printing on photo paper only — wasted on plain paper |
Draft mode on plain paper looks lighter, and for a document you are going to read and recycle that is entirely fine. The one caveat: on a printer that sits idle for long stretches, draft mode's lighter coverage can make an early-stage nozzle clog more visible. That is a symptom, not a cause — see faded and streaky prints.
What actually saves ink, in order
- Draft quality for everyday documents. The single biggest lever, and it costs you nothing but a slightly lighter page.
- Black ink only for anything without meaningful colour. Stops colour cartridges emptying on black text.
- Print preview, every time. The cheapest page is the one you did not print. Print to PDF first on anything long.
- Kill dark backgrounds. A dark-themed slide deck or a web page printed with its background can use more ink in twenty pages than a month of normal documents. Most browsers have a Background graphics checkbox in the print dialog — leave it off.
- Print double-sided. Saves paper rather than ink, but halves the cost of the other consumable.
- Use the browser's reader mode or "print selection" for web pages, which strips ads, navigation and images.
- Leave the printer powered on at the wall. Counter-intuitive, but a printer that is cut from power cannot run its low-level maintenance, and it compensates with a full cleaning cycle at the next power-up. Cleaning cycles use considerably more ink than the pages you were trying to save.
And what does not save much
- Switching fonts. The difference between typefaces at the same size is real but small — a few percent — and nothing like the effect of dropping to draft. The claims made for "ink-saving fonts" mostly rest on them rendering smaller at the same nominal point size.
- Shrinking margins. Fits more text per page, which saves paper; the ink per character is unchanged.
- Removing a colour cartridge to force black-only printing. Most inkjets simply refuse to print at all with a cartridge missing, and some will report an error until it is replaced.
- Ignoring low-ink warnings indefinitely. Running a cartridge genuinely dry on a printer with an integrated head can let air into the nozzles, which turns a cartridge replacement into a printhead problem. Our guide on checking real ink levels covers reading the actual figure rather than the warning.
Why your cartridge never lasts as long as the box says
Every manufacturer quotes a page yield, and every user finds their real-world figure is lower. Neither party is lying — the number is measured against a standard, and the standard is not your documents.
- Inkjet cartridge yields are measured under ISO/IEC 24711, which prints a fixed suite of standard test documents continuously until the cartridge is exhausted.
- Monochrome toner yields use ISO/IEC 19752, based on a test page with roughly 5% coverage — about a page of ordinary double-spaced text, and much lighter than most real documents.
- The tests print continuously. Your printer sits idle between jobs and runs maintenance cycles when it wakes, and that ink never reaches paper.
Manufacturers publish their own explanations — Epson's ink yield page and HP's page yield methodology are both worth a skim if you want to compare cartridges honestly. The practical upshot: use quoted yields to compare cartridges against each other, never to predict how many pages you personally will get. Our guide to how long ink cartridges really last goes further into the gap between the two numbers.
Six defaults worth changing right now
| Setting | Default | Change it to | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Print quality | Normal | Draft for everyday work | Largest single reduction in ink per page |
| Colour | Colour | Black ink only | Stops colour ink being spent on black text |
| Duplex | Off | On | Halves paper immediately |
| Browser background graphics | Varies | Off | Prevents heavy backgrounds draining cartridges |
| Sleep timer | Often 5 minutes | 15–30 minutes | Fewer wake-up maintenance cycles |
| Power | Switched off at the wall | Left plugged in | Avoids a full cleaning cycle at every power-up |
Photo settings, briefly
Everything above is aimed at documents. Photos invert the advice: use Best or Photo quality, select the actual paper type in the driver (glossy, matte, premium photo) rather than leaving it on plain, and let the printer use all its inks. Selecting the right paper type matters more than the quality setting — it tells the driver how much ink the surface can absorb, and getting it wrong is the usual cause of a photo that comes out either washed out or wet and smeared. Our guide to printing photos at home that look like lab prints covers the whole workflow.
When settings are not the answer
There is a floor to what settings can save. If you print enough that ink is a real line item, the two changes that move the number properly are the cartridge you buy and the printer you buy.
On cartridges: high-yield XL versions almost always cost less per page than standard ones, and compatible or remanufactured cartridges cost less again. If you have wondered whether the second option is safe for your printer, we covered the evidence in are compatible ink cartridges safe to use, and the wider question of why the original ink costs what it does in why printer ink is so expensive.
On printers: cost per page varies by more than a factor of ten across machines that all cost about the same to buy. Our roundup of printers with the cheapest ink ranks them on that basis, and the ink cost calculator will tell you what your current one is costing.
Troubleshooting
| Problem | Cause | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Colour cartridges empty even though you only print text | Grayscale is on but black-ink-only is not | Find the black ink only option in the driver and set it as the default |
| Grayscale prints look brown or green | Composite black using colour inks, one of which is low or partly clogged | Switch to black ink only, then run a nozzle check |
| Draft mode prints with gaps or bands | Partially clogged nozzles, revealed by lighter coverage | See printhead cleaning |
| Printer refuses to print in black with an empty colour cartridge | Normal behaviour on most inkjets | Replace the colour cartridge; the restriction is by design |
| Photos print washed out on glossy paper | Paper type left on Plain in the driver | Select the exact paper type before printing |
| Ink drops fast with almost no printing | Frequent cleaning cycles from repeated power cycling | Leave the printer plugged in and lengthen the sleep timer |
The short version
Grayscale is about how the page looks. Black ink only is about which cartridges get used. Draft is about how much ink lands on the sheet. Set draft plus black ink only as your defaults, keep Best for photos and anything client-facing, and leave the printer plugged in. That combination costs nothing and, on a printer used daily, is worth more than any of the ink-saving tricks that circulate online.
When it is time for a refill, the Find Ink by Printer page matches your exact model to the right cartridge, or browse HP, Canon, Epson and Brother ink and toner directly.
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