Force OS X to print in grayscale

July 10, 2007 11:52 AM

Is there a way to force Mac OS X to print in grayscale on a color laser?

We own an HP 2605dn color laser, running version 4.6 (build 161.9) of their driver software. This is on our Intel iMac with OS X 10.4.10. There's many times we don't want to print in color so we don't use up the color toners, and instead just want to do grayscale.

HP's support has been less than stellar on this, and I wasn't sure if there's some aftermarket generic driver, or a place in the system properties that I can't find that lets me force it to not print color. Alternatively, it would be nice if I could have two printers configured in OS X - one a grayscale printer, the other a color printer, but both pointing to our single 2605dn.

posted by JibberJabber to computers & internet (3 comments total)

In my printer dialog, there is a tab called "ColorSync" (pops up when you click and hold on "copies and pages". There is a Quartzfilter dropdown there that gives you several color choices, including grayscale.

Don't know if this is the right solution, but you didn't mention that you had tried it, soo....
posted by Aquaman at 11:57 AM on July 10, 2007

After Aquaman's suggestion, you can save the preset, and then you can choose either preset before printing.
posted by :-) at 12:03 PM on July 10, 2007

I came across that setting when trying to print, but for some reason Adobe Reader 8.1 doesn't give me any options for the quartzfilter drop down under ColorSync. But, in other apps (like Firefox) it works fine.

Thanks a bunch!
posted by JibberJabber at 12:11 PM on July 10, 2007