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Posipiet
Asked: 2010-12-01 06:53:19 +0800 CST

Printserver configuration B&W preferred, Color choseable

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We are in the process of replacing a selection of different old black&white and color printers with several new color multifunction devices. This might lead to greatly increased printing costs.

This year, we had about 400k b&w and 100k color prints.

So far, most of the b&w prints are pdfs with a bit if color, like a logo. Most of the color prints were posters or powerpoint presentations with plenty color. Speaking of 500k pages a year, even marginal savings amount to quite a sum.

We have a Printserver Win 2003 R2.

Clients are WinXP and Win7, 32 and 64 bit.

Printer(s): Canon iR 2380i. Printer driver is up to date.

Our users print plenty documents which are partly color. Default Printer setting is automatic, therefore stuff gets printed in color.

We do not want to introduce printing policies or counters or bureaucracy.

The preferred setup would print b&w by default, and color only if the user wants to, by clicking "color" in the printer settings. This setting should reset after each print job. The current functionality is "print automatic color/b&w by default, user can switch to color or b&w, resets after each print job".

The Settings dialog does allow to change the default settings, but this does not include the color choice!

Is there a way to set this up? How do you handle color printing cost?

print-server shared-printers

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    We have an ImageRunner 3220, so the option names may vary slightly on your model. Configuring the printer's defaults on the print server (rather than client end) should make the settings affect all users. See this related SF question: Changing shared printer settings to default to greyscale.

    On the print server, under the printer's properties, in the Advanced tab, open the Printing Defaults. alt text

    The Firey Printing tab should allow you to create/modify job templates.
    alt text

    You can create additional "Job Templates", as Canon calls them, to provide your users quick settings such as duplex finishing, stapling, color, etc.

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  2. I work for a University, and we do on the order of 2 million pages every academic quarter. Printing costs are very much on our mind.

    We handles this through print quotas, charge-back schemes, and driver configuration. For most drivers, and I believe the Canon iR printers are no different, allow setting default driver settings on the print-server itself. In order to make this work:

    • We have to set the printers themselves to only allow printing from the print-server, no direct IP printing by clients
    • Set the printer on the print-server to have the following default settings. I believe even the Canon iR printer drivers support this. This means that users have to take positive action to print in color.
      • Print duplex
      • Print B&W
    • Add a second preset driver config for Color. If they need simplex printing, they'll have to set it themselves.
    • Set security on the print-objects so that regular users can't change settings, only designated Printer Admins.

    And even that not quite enough. Some applications are smart enough to detect that something being printed has color and auto-change the driver settings to allow color. In order to deal with those, we had to locate some "Black-and-White Only" drivers for our Canon printers (they're out there, ask Canon support if you need to) and use those for the B&W print-object, and the regular drivers for the Color print-object.

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