When the click price for colour is considerably more than B/W the problem I have is when printing out a document with both colour and B/W it often registers B/W as colour, does anyone know an easy workaround.

What specific printer?

We have the same thing with our IRC3200/imagepass C1 and IRC3220/imagepass C2 and just accept it as the way the driver is. If we specifically send a job to the driver and set the driver to cmyk the click is color. If we specifically set the driver to bw the click is black and white. We have no way to send a mixed bw/color document at once other than paying for all pages as color. Also we have no way to duplex one side color and one side black and white without paying for both sides color. We simply break up the job if there is any quantity involved and then post-collate. If it's just a few copies we figure it all evens out overall with this slight overcharge balancing out some of the heavy pages we print.

We have the CLC3200 and Imagepress C1.

There are workarounds in some cases. Microsoft Words default black setting needs to be changed from automatic to black. If you are supplied with pdf files they can be taken into Photoshop, changed to greyscale, saved as tiff files and placed into InDesign, you then label it as black. Companies like Canon will not spend money trying to solve this problem as they are enjoying the extra revenue.

Am I reading that right that with InDesign you can print a mixed color and black and white document and are only charged color clicks for the color pages? I don't have indesign - I'm a CorelDraw user since 1992 (I know, I know) and have not found any way to accomplish this other than splitting the print job into color and black and white pages. (I could probably use job build and print in sections, but I havne't needed it to be together that badly to date, being easier to just post-colalte.)

I tried a few times printing mixed PDFs and it always registered the black pages as color clicks for me so I gave up after a few tries thinking it would always not only often do this. Maybe I didn't try enough with the print driver...

On the subject of saving money, with our two IRCs I really wish they had a way to print a strip, scan it off either the belt or a scan with reg marks, and then adjust density across the drum to compensate for weak spots. This would really extend drum life. I don't think we'll ever see that for the IRCs though as they like selling new drums I suppose! I think you might have this feature for the imagepress though ???

When creating a job from scratch using InDesign a document with mixed colour and B/W pages is not an issue the black you choose is 100% black. With Coral Draw do you have the facility to change the black text from Auto to black.

Drum life etc. is not an issue with me as we are on contract, where click charges cover full parts and labour.

I need to revisit this -- until I read your post tonight, I hadn't thought about it since 2003 (interesting how you often get into doing something one way, sometimes a workaround, and don't give it another thought) which was a couple versions back of corel at which time I thought it was just how the print drivers worked. Will check this out tommorrow!