Q: Why did I get charged for a colour page instead of a Black & White page?

A: The problem occurs when the document(s) you printed were probably scanned in or created as a "colour" document by the instructor, professor or who ever posted the document. Sometimes there is no real way to tell unless you read the raw code of the file before the application processes the file for display.

Somewhere during the scanning, editing and posting steps, code is generated to define the document. The application you used created a print request in postcript for the printer to process. If the application passes information that the document is "colour" then the printer processes the page as colour and you are charged that colour rate. This is true even if there is no real visible colour when you look at the printed page. (Sometimes you can see the difference if you look real closely. Another hint that it might be a colour document is when the "black" print isn't sharp or it's handwritten or contains images.)

Unfortunately, it is going to take some time for the this information to propagate back to the source.

Fortunately, you can get a BLACK & WHITE printout. Click here to find out how.