Comment 24 for bug 235399

I'm having the same problem as the OP. I'm on Hardy and using an HP OfficeJet 5610. I went looking for a reason why my color ink was being drained on black text documents printed in OpenOffice (though I've confirmed it does the same in Abiword). I've read a lot tonight, including this thread, and I'm still rather confused as to why the printer would ever use color to produce black and white, particularly when there is a full black cartridge. In this case, there wasn't a single pixel of color in the entire document, which adds to the confusion. For what ink costs, I'm motivated to find out more!

Could someone help me understand the difference between "Printout Mode" and the second option which provides a bunch of resolution/color combinations? Is Printout Mode simply a few main options with all those other things preset in most often used bundles? Or is there something I will be missing if I set a quality combination on my own in the second section? Until now I've just left HPLIP settings on automatic and assumed that the application would call for what it needed. If I set this to something specific as has been suggested, like 300dpi, color, black + color cart, will this cause issues for other programs?

Most of the accounts I have found about this issue involve the HP 5610, FWIW. Let me know if I can provide any useful information.