Difference between Grayscale and Black and White Options on ScanEZ Station

Black and white (monochrome),has only two "colors", black (ink or toner) and white (no ink or toner). It is used for things like text, where you want everything that is a printed character to be black and the background white (unprinted).

Grayscale contains shades of grey and is used for reproducing images. It is a continuous scale from black to white in photographic and similar processes. On consumer laser and inkjet printers, the printer creates the shades using micro-dot patterns that generally require magnification. These patterns are typically designed to reproduce approximately 256 discrete shades.

Say you want to photocopy some text. When you scan the page, the paper and wrinkles will have some color (not pure white), and areas of the text might be faint. If you print that in grayscale, you will get an accurate "photograph" of what the scanner saw. If you want maximum readability, you would use black and white, forcing everything darker than a certain threshold to black, and everything else would be white. This will be easier to read and a better representation of how the original came out of the printer.