Colour laser toner waste

[DWhitley]

I have a Lexmark C534 colour laser which has been used solely for black and white docs for several weeks. Recently, the colour toner cartridges seem to have gone down rather quickly and the waste toner box has filled up. I'm not an expert on laser printers but I thought that they were less wasteful than inkjets when used for black and white. Can anyone tell me if colour lasers do, in fact, actually waste colour toner when printing in black and white?
I can remove the colour bits if I have to but it's a pain to have to do this.

[peterb]

Might be worth checking the level of the black toner. Some in kjets used to switch to using the colour cartridges when the black onee was empty, although I haven't heard of a laser doing that.

Some laser printers peroidically transfer toner from the main reservoir to another area, for immediate use, so that might account for the waste if it loads colour toner as well, but that is only speculation.

[DWhitley]

Thanks but black toner level is fine. I don't think it moves it anywhere else - I can see the mechanics and the route seems quite simple.

[GoNz0]

it moves it all around each time it comes out of sleep or gets powered up m8, thats why its dropping

[dave87]

My Father had one of the rather large Konica Minolta colour lasers, and found that it was cheaper to run two printers - one for solely black and white, and one for colour, than to use the colour laser all the time.

They are expensive to run though, so I think he ended up going for a Xerox Phaser. Expensive to buy, but much, much, cheaper in the long run. Good print quality and a waxy finish to the paper, more resilient than simple laser printing.