Ive got a very strange of circumstance to tell all you experts about. Look above at my specifications It pretty much basic ole dated stuff.thing is it works perfectly for my application which is an A2 "Hamshack" Newspaper,yes well theres 4 pages ,8 sides of news and comment and photographs,photos compatible with the "95-2000" era technology. I admit,its geting on but for the moment and for the money it applies its self to my application perfectly.The "journal" by the way is called "Sheridans Journal".And if you live close by you might have even read a copy,The content prides itself on "Anarchic" reporting and reports and comment. Anyway my discovery /problem is i have this setup connected(parallelport) To an old A2 Epson printer(four colour--Black,Cyan Yellow ,Magenta) Any way my really mind boggling problem/Discovery is ,The other day the Black cartridge ran out and because they are hard to find at a reasonable price I made another spare Cyan cartridge I had fit,it is just a plastic box case with "Plastic Lugs" on the botom which correspond to the fitting inside the printer,this is so you dont accidently replace the different colour cartridge in the wrong place!! Anyway I filed the bottom lug of the "Cyan" cartridge and placed it in the black cartridges position any way after some time the printed writing on the newpaper sheets came out blue!!--Not so much of a problem as it cost me nothing extra. Now for the amazing problem/question.Right at the end of the last article on page 8 there is a photo of me. Now in this photo my hair and eyes are in Fact as black as coal,but when the printer prints this photo instead of my hair coming out blue(Remember I have swapped cartridge positions) It comes out perfectly black,even the blue in the photo comes out blue. upon inspection of the printing head which is like a Black box moving from right to left across the paper,I notice there is a type of ribbon cable composed of 5 Thin tubes which moves also with the movement of the black box.!!! My question is if the Black cartridge has run out and is now blue(Cyan)How come the photo is perfectly acceptable with my black hair.How is this possible(Other than there being a spare "emergency resevoir" within the "black Box"??????

sorry I made a mistake there are only 4 tubes inside the printer--Yellow--Black-- Cyan--Magenta I presume?? Wher is the black for the perfect untarnished photo coming from??

when my black cartridge is getting low i get a message on the screen saying do i want it to make black instead by combining the colours to conserve the black cartridge. The printer can create black by combining the three colours without a need for the black cartridge (well its probably almost black, but black enough). So when you print a photo I believe it porbably always only uses the colours and not the black cartridge and it only uses the black cartridge for black actual proper black words/text and not any black(ish) parts of pictures (unless you actually tell it to print in black and white instead of colour).

I agree with cliff page. It is using the three colours to produce a representation of black. Some cheap colour printers don't even have a black cartridge and combine the colours to produce black all the time whether printing text or graphics. If you look very closely at the black so produced under bright daylight you will probably see a slight green tinge. The colour is in fact a very dark green that is almost but not quite black. You will probably only notice the difference when you compare it with something that has been printed with black ink. Stuart