Canon ip4300 Printer Color and Grayscale Test Pattern Problem

Download the user manual from Canon's website. It will help you troubleshoot.

Canon U.S.A. : Support & Drivers : PIXMA iP4300

Complete coverage of the Canon Pixma iP4300 Printer | PCWorld

Canon PIXMA iP4300 - PIXMA Inkjet Printer - Canon UK

Does it print the colors and grays accurately, other than just the test?

Yes it does.

It prints a color chart correctly. When I select the grayscale in the preferences it prints a perfect grayscale in black ink.

However using a any test patterns that include a grayscale, that I found on the Internet, the colors are correct but the grayscale is printed using brown not black ink.

Marv

This is probably a software communication issue.....How is it a problem?

Then the test pattern isn't really grayscale is all I can conclude.

If the printer's test prints true then it isn't your printer (?)

If you really need to print a grayscale image then you could try setting the print job to "print colours as grey" or whatever your print setup menu suggests for this. I sometimes do this for monochrome test prints before wasting colour ink.

I suspect Canon is intentionally wasting colored inks. To make black you can use black ink or triads of the primaries. If the primaries are not spot on = muddy brown instead of black and it wastes color. They make a huge mergin on ink, which has a cost of less than 1 cent plus cartridge, so they waste color to make black instead of using black ink. The black ink is usually larger and cheaper.

Power users (of colour inkjet printers) here set up their vanilla flavoured consumer grade colour printers with external ink tanks and flexible feed hoses to modified printhead cartridges. Very cheap to run.

Chinese of course.

If you have a Canon printer with 4 or less color cartridges, the problem may be as simple as that Canon can only use 3 at a time and mixes the three colors for (pseudo) black and uses the black cartridge only for text.

I have a Canon IP4000 with 5 cartridges, two of which are black, one for text and the other for graphics.....

I do not fully understand the reasons why, but my printer has both a print head for text and a print head for graphics, built into the same physical unit.....

It would appear that due to manufacturing tolerances (guess!), they can only use one print head at a time.....the text ink cartridge is several times larger than any of the colors.

I read the IP4300 manual and could not see what it has for inks exactly....It did mention more than one print head though....

Sorry I could not be more help.

I did several more test including reinstalling the printer driver and changing the setting from High Quality Color to Printing a Composite Document. I also used six different test patterns some all black grayscales and and some with both colors and grayscales. They all print the colors correctly and the grayscale pattern correctly but in brown ink.

Also when the printer is set to grayscale printing it prints perfect grayscales.

Therefore the only conclusion I can make is that the Canon iP4300 cannot print a black and white grayscale and a colored image at the same time.

Thanks for all your suggestions.

Marv

If that's right then it totally blows.

What happens when you print photos or letterheads, coloured graphs and the like?

Why did you not tell us how many ink cartridges your printer uses?

LOL! I've seen this so many times it isn't funny!

What is happening is this: The printer driver must choose between color OR black ink only.

This printer, and many others like it are inkjet printers. When printing in color, black is "created" from the combination of the other color inks. When printing in black and white, the black ink is used only. It is not that the printer can't use color AND black, it is that when printing photos, using black ink causes too much contrast.

Check your driver settings and turn off anything that talks about Photo quality printing. That should make your charts and graphs and test pages use all four inks.

Hi All,

Sorry that I forgot to tell you that there are five ink cartridges in the iP4300.

Four are dyes Yellow, Cyan, Magenta, Black. The fifth is pigmented Black.

Marv