This printer has four ink colours - Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black. When you are printing something that has only black colour, it probably still tries to print using the other three colours, too because the representation of "black" internally is for dark amounts of all colours. To prevent this and force it to use only the black ink, look in your printer Properties and see if you have the option to print in black only, or maybe in Greyscale. You can do this for any document individually, but setting black only normally will NOT become a permanent setting, so you'll have to do it again for each such document. By default, however, it will be set to use all colours and you can print coloured documents with no trouble.