Text Edit Printer Problems

I recently got a new HP printer for Christmas which for the most functions well. However, having now printed almost 200 pages, I notice I'm almost out of colored ink and have barely scratched the black. What's up? For some reason, I seem to be printing with all the color and not the black. When I print a test page, which is an Apple test page, the black is very much blacker than the black I printed. So obviously i'm not tapping the right reservoir. I noticed that there's things like shadow and opacity and blur built into the program and I assume these things are keeping me from just busting out straight ink pages. Am I missing something, or is there a way to set things up so I can print straight black and white pages? Do i need a different program? Or is the problem with my printer?

The problem is with the printer driver and how HP printers function not your Mac or any program. HP (and some other printer manufacturers) would rather have you spend your hard earned $$$ on ink refills than provide an economical solution to straight BW printing.

I don't know of a work around for the OS X drivers provided by HP. In Windows you can usually substitute an alternate driver that functions BW only and avoid the costly color refills. However, I have not discovered how to do that with OS X. That's why for my every day printing I use a BW Laserjet which is far more economical to operate.

Regards.

HP Printer Drivers

I dug around a bit on the apple support site. Near as I can figure, the drivers I need are built into the OSX updates. I hit the updater and it found the new HP drivers it was talking about, and since they're coming from apple, i'm assuming they're gonna get things going the right direction. There was something else mentioned about being able to reset to default printer drivers too, but i'm hoping this just sets everything up straight and proper. Is this the right track? Thanks.