I have a brother printer and I recently bought black ink and it wont work in less i have all the colors....is this normal or is there something I can do???????

Greyscale is color not black only.
You can print in black and it will look grayscale only darker, printers are a pain to work with after a year has gone by, I can expect almost a half hour to print something with my $400 epson because one of the colors is out even though I never printed in the last year a colored page. I take the color cartirges out and they are empty, but I only print a page 2-3 times a year. I use the scanner all the time. Brother and epson have their print heads in the printer not the cartridge so make sure your inks are always have something in it or it will be miricle for the printer to last more than a year. Check colors every other week. One Epson printer only lasted 3 months because I never used it(print head dried up). Never use the set up with tubes running outside printer to small tanks of ink if you only use it occationally.

I had that model and the same experience. I kept buying ink until I realized I could have nearly bought the printer for nearly the same cost as ink refills, black and color. I also had an HP. Same thing. I finally bought the Kodak 3250. The ads about ink costs was so correct. Many more pages are printed before the "need ink" message is displayed. Buying ink online saves even more.

If any of the ink cartridges need to be replaced the printer will not work. Also, if you are printing only black you will need to go into print properties and select black.

This is common problem with Brother Printers. I am going to assume you are using Non-Brother branded ink cartridges. Brother cartridges have a cleanser in the ink that most generic cartridges don't have. This in turn causes the jets to clog and not allow ink to pass through them. The fix is to go buy a couple of Brother cartridges and do a cleaning with those cartridges. You may spend some money doing this as a cleaning wastes a lot of ink, but it will clean the injection lines and fix the printer. You could also consider buying a new printer. I know this is not the answer you were looking for, but it is the true answer. I just bought a new printer due to this fact.

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Hi,
No many of the printers will need to have both the color and the black cartridges to work...
You will have to purchase and install a new cartridge to get it working correctly.

heatman101

Hi

You need to clean your printhead
becouse it is clogged
try cleanning it from printers menu

ps vote us to keep us alive

If you haven't changed it recently, it may be out of black ink. The product code for Black is LC51BK.

Brother's supply site

what are you trying to print in black? the best way to test out a black ink is to open word pad and type some thing random and print it and see if that works. if you have a all in one printer u might have 2 inks one color and one black in the printer

did you take the tape off the new cartridge and is the print head burned out for the black? if you installed the diagnostic's on it then run it and see what it says, otherwise expect the print head to be cooked, however it is possible to get a bad ink cartridge try tapping it on your finger and see if ink comes out if it does not then the ink cartridge is dried out or no good, about %15 of print cartridges are bad on just about any brand printer some more than others.

slowly off and on the printer for five times without cartridge, printer saves data of cart of last 5 only so next time it reads full ink..