Save costs by creating black and white only print queue for color copiers

Running color prints on our Canon ImageRunner C6800 costs us $.09 a page.  Black and white prints cost us $.009 a page. Big difference. We are trying to keep costs down (what good business isn't?) so I was trying to figure out how to better control the amount of color prints done through the network.

I blogged about this problem about two weeks ago on my personal blog. You can click here to go to that entry. A person named simply Andy who apparently does the Absoblogginlutely blog posted the idea to use a generic HP black and white driver. After reading his comment I smacked myself upside the head and thought "why didn't I think of that?"

The issue wasn't solved so easily though. The Canon print board doesn't recognize jobs that are sent to it using HP drivers, so I figured why not try drivers from a black and white only Canon copier? Took me some trial and error to find the right model to use, but find it I did.

The correct black and white only drivers to use for the C6800 ended up being the iR 5000-6000 drivers. So now, the people who do the bulk of their printing can print to this black and white only queue and use the normal queue for any print jobs that they have that NEED to be in color. This has greatly reduced the number of color prints made to the copier.

Thanks to Andy for the suggestion that got me on the right path to success in resolving the problem.

The above fix was implemented on a Windows Server 2003 print server, but should work on any Windows print server as well as Samba or other OS based print servers.