this post was submitted on 27 Mar 2024
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The K in CMYK is grey, not black. The other ink tones are added to make it appear black.
Edit: It seems people don't want to hear that. But sorry, that's how CMYK works. Black is roughly C=75 M=68 Y=67 K=89 in most major colour profiles used for printing. When you tell your printer to print something black, it won't use just Key (around 85-90% grey), and will apply normal CMYK blacks which use value from all 4 inks.
It's been like this for 120 years and is not a "big printer" conspiracy. If you don't like this, don't use a CMYK printer. It's just going to print CMYK values with CMYK inks like you told it to and none of those inks is black.
My color laser printer uses only K to print blacK. It takes four cartridges, and I’ve only had to replace the C, M, and Y cartridges once in the 15 years or so I’ve owned it, because I almost never print pages with color.
It sounds like your printer has a true monochrome mode you can specify. Makes and models that are more user-hostile often use drivers that default to grayscale for non-color prints.