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When printing a document on a printer with separate color and bw page counters for billing purposes, it's important to get the printer to not print color unless absolutely necessary.

In this case I'm using a laser printer (XEROX WC 7220), but it's the same with most printers.

The issue reveals itself when printing large page count documents that have a couple of color information but the printer still counts all the pages as color, when the logo is present.

If I use text only then the printer is actually able to single out automatically which pages have color from which do not. The issue I'm interested in solving is when using an image, or more specifically a logo.

The logo I'm using has black and grayscale elements and is saved as PNG. I imported it to Photoshop and changed the color mode to grayscale, to make sure it was BW.

When imported to Word the image is always considered as having color. Is there a method or image format that will unequivocally only have Grayscale values, without losing image detail?

What I'm NOT looking for:

  • Info on how to print a page black and white
  • Formatting an inserted image as "black and white" or "grayscale" - it doesn't make any difference
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  • 1
    Even if the document has no color information, it's common for color printers to use small amounts of color to print grayscale images. – fixer1234 Jul 21 '16 at 17:50
  • Hi @fixer1234, I'm aware of that. But though it is common, what I was hoping to find is a sure way of avoiding the printer printing with color when unnecessary (laser color prints are exceedingly expensive) – acseven Jul 21 '16 at 21:22
  • I tried to clean up the post a little so it is more obvious what you are asking. Since what you are really asking about is converting an image in a specific manner, you may want to most of the talk about Word / printer and focus on image conversion. That is what distracted me. By the time I was done reading about Word and printer, I completely missed the "I'm not looking for" statement. Just a suggestion. – CharlieRB Jul 22 '16 at 12:37
  • @acseven, your question is now super-explicit that you aren't interested in printing to B&W. The more I think about this, though, it seems to me that printing as true B&W may be the only way to do what you want. I'm not talking about grayscale, but creating a document where any images are already halftoned B&W, and then printing as a true B&W job, so you aren't asking the printer to render gray or print anything but black. – fixer1234 Jul 23 '16 at 16:49
  • Thanks for the input - printing in BW would be excellent, but it is an hassle to handle printing a few (or a lot) of pages in between a given document that actually have color in it. I'm guessing I really should dive into how the XEROX works, as it is supposed to be smart enough to tell the difference. – acseven Jul 23 '16 at 22:13
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Note: This really should be asked as two separate questions, but since they are pertaining to the same document, I will give you both answers.

Printing the page black and white is a printer setting. When you are at the print dialog, choose Printer Properties (or something similar depending on the printer), then choose Black & White.

enter image description here

Formatting an inserted image in Word is simple.

  1. Right click on the picture
  2. Choose Format Picture from the context menu
  3. Choose Picture Color on the left
  4. Move the saturation slider to 0%
  5. Click close
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  • It is common for printers, to simply consider even black textto be color if you select the Color print option. If you want the printer to only print in Black and White and not use your colored ink selecting the Black & White option is the best way to do that. Author might not have been looking to be told how to print a document in black & white but that doesn't change the fact this is the correct answer to the question they asked. – Ramhound Jul 21 '16 at 18:12
  • Hi, did you see the final bullets were preceded by "here's what I'm not looking for:"? I.e. the question is marked in bold, paragraph before "Thanks" – acseven Jul 21 '16 at 21:19
  • Nope. Glazed right over the *not*. – CharlieRB Jul 22 '16 at 12:00

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