Rants

Many businesses tend to lease copiers and pay a base price plus a per-copy fee, at different rates, for black and white copies and color copies. And often times you will see the bill skyrocket when users start printing primarily in color. IT can set printers to default to black and white but users usually will override those settings and change it to color instead.

Here is what is commonly seen. Admins set up the Printer Default settings so that when the printers are initially installed via a share to the workstations, they will be set to print black and white by default. However people can make per-user changes afterwards by editing Printing Preferences, which will override the Printer Default settings. IT can lock this down with security permissions, but then people can’t print in color.

The way I see it you have 2 options:

• Educate users on the associated costs, thus showing why to not change their Printing Preferences to default to color
• Share 2 printers from the print server: One defualted to black and white, the other color. You still can’t really lock these printers down entirely, as users can’t make adjustments needed for some print jobs. (This option only solves the problem of people forgetting to change their Printer Preferences back to Grayscale)

Just remember, when submitting a print job in color, even if the page is in black and white, the color counter is incremented and your machine will be billed accordingly if you pay per click maintenance. Also, sorry if the title is misleading.