Patent ID: 8117134

Claim:
A system including a non-transitory computer readable media adapted to calculate appropriate billing within an imaging pipeline, comprising: an input component that receives an image that is described as a plurality of pixels; a driver including a Page Description Language (PDL) component that receives the image and determines a location, a color and a gray-pixel designation for each of the one or more pixels; a marking engine modifies the one or more pixels with the gray-pixel designation and places each of the one or more pixels as a monochrome or a composite pixel on a substrate, the modification includes placing cyan, magenta, yellow (CMY) color rather than a predetermined black at the designated gray-pixels; a processor including an analysis component that counts the number of monochrome and composite pixels placed on the substrate by the marking engine, the number of composite pixels that include a designation are counted as monochrome; and a processor including a billing component that calculates the cost for placing each of the monochrome and the composite pixels counted by the analysis component, the billing component removing the designated gray pixels from a calculation for composite pixels.