Epson Stylus 1520 won't print black

Purging Procedure - If you have just installed a new archival or Quadtone cartridge you must purge the Epson print head of all of the old, non-archival, ink before you can begin to print with the full archival effect. The print heads in the Epson 200/400/440/500/600/640/740/800/850/860/900/1160/1520/Photo/Photo 700/Photo EX/Photo 750/Photo 1200 printers hold about 3 to 5 pages worth of ink. Always run a Nozzle check before printing. Even if you get a perfect nozzle check on your first try after putting in a new cartridge, run at least one or two head cleaning cycles. This will prevent any excess ink from over filling the print head. After the cleaning cycles, use the purging test patterns below to purge your system of the old ink. After printing about 5 (8.5x11) pages of this pattern, 98% of the old ink will be gone. The rest will come out slowly and may take as many as 20 or more pages, but at the 98% point you will see good results. If you have an Epson 3000, 5000 or 9000. See below

I just had this exact problem on my HP 5514. Black won't print after running out of black ink. New cartridge no good.
I tried everything-no good. I suspected the pinholes in the printhead were clogged with dried ink because I didn't change cartridge in time.
The fix that worked perfectly was when I hacksaw top off old black cartridge & removed all foam wicks so now I had a funnel(can see clear thru). I installed the cartridge & filled it with alcohol, printed page & did head clean; then printed few more pages. Problem cleared almost immediately. I then soaked up extra alcohol inside cartridge with paper towel. Removed modified cartridge & installed good one. I guess this could be done for colors as well. I don't know if this is a proper procedure, but it sure worked well for me.

Silly question: Did you remove the plastic tape from the bottom of the cartridges when you installed them?

Be sure you are using genuine epson ink. Epson printers are "smart" and will not allow generic ink to work properly. Even after you replace a generic with a genuine it may take several print outs and alignments to get it to print again.

You should run a nozzle check to verify if the heads are printing all the inks correctly. If the pattern is incomplete you need to run head cleanings.

take your ink cartridge out from your printer. you can see at the ink carriage there are little pipes where the ink usually flow from cartridge. If head cleaning and power cleaning does not work, then try to clean those pipes by using 96% alcohol fluids and **** the pipes using something.

You need to open up the maintenance window and go thru the motions that you are changing the cartridges and this resets the ink levels back to full and sends data to the printer saying that they are full and the ink light disappears and it prints fine !!!

Just changing them doesn't seem to do the trick like on a lot of printers

epson.com, actually you can print using black ink only, but you have to reset the color ink for it to register as full. :) or you can freeze the ink counter using the ssc service utility before the other ink rans out. :)

same on a test page?

There could be something wrong with the connections going to the ink jet cartridge in the printer.

Someone should take a look at it.