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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

How I get screwed: My HP printer will occasionally print a black-and-white page using all three colors of ink. Discovered this one day when I rubbed a fresh page and it smeared three colors. They call it 'wear leveling' or something. But we all know it means 'using up your expensive color ink instead of your cheap black ink'. What a crock.

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This should be an option, so that if your black ink has run out but your color ink hasn't, you can print something without having to go buy more ink. But as a default I agree it shouldn't do this.

That's why my HP printer only has a black cartridge. The socket for the color cartridge is empty.

Yeah the problem is that some of them don't allow you to do this anymore.

Overall I've started to buy B&W only laser printers and I buy a new printer when the toner runs out.

You can find Samsung entry level laser printers with a toner good for 300-500 pages on Amazon for about 30£ on sale that's cheaper than buying a toner.

1st world problems for sure but this is beyond stupid.

The replacement toner is worth buying too, lasts some thousands of pages. I love my cheap Samsung lasers.

I have bad news for you.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/10677/hp-acquire-samsung-print...

I bought it once it but it costs about 50-60 GBP (i had printers for as low as 17 GBP on sale) and it only doubles the page count if you use it all the time, once you let the tones sit they seem to degrade quite quickly for some reason.

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