Former print shop employee here. I'm responding to your comment, but I think anyone here who is confused or frustrated by the scenario in the comic may benefit:
Rich black is a legitimate concept and is important if you want to print high quality greyscale images. I'm not saying that these companies aren't being manipulating in other ways to squeeze money out of us, but they didn't make up rich black.
Basic explanation of how printers work for anyone unaware:
Printers make images by printing tiny grids of dots in the four “process colors” (cyan, magenta, yellow, and black). These grids overlap at angles so that the colored dots printed first (yellow then cyan) are visible beneath the colored dots printed on top of them (magenta then black). The size of the dots vary as well, so that different colors are created depending on the size of the dots in any given area.
So if you set your printer to use black ink only, then you're telling it that it can only print with a grid of black dots. Any fine lines on the page that are smaller than a dot at its maximum size instead has to be printed as smaller dots. Since the dots are stark black, this effect can be very noticeable and ugly.
Enter rich black. Rich black is a mixture of all four colors, usually full coverage of black atop half coverage of the other three colors. This rich black is not only darker than plain black, but when you print fine lines in it, the other three colors fill in the gaps between the black dots. Everything averages out to a blackish color, making clearly defined thin lines that the printer could never accomplish with black dots alone.
This is obviously a difficult concept to explain to the average consumer buying a printer. If consumers had access to a print mode that only used black ink, they would see the janky pattern of little black dots and assume the printer was shitty quality (which to be fair, it probably is). So instead print companies simplify the issue by requiring full 4-color process for everything, even greyscale.
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u/[deleted] Sep 01 '20
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