MP270 prints blue not black for text documents but will photocopy in black perfectly

[raymatsell]

I have several cartridges with plenty of black ink, and photocopying works fine but printing text or anything from  the computer with the grayscale setting prints blue. I've tried all the cleaning processes multiple times. I have tried selection high resoltion paper and high resoltuion print, which has been tried for other models, and am now running out of ideas. (note colour isn't printing properly at present either, with a new 'compatible' cartridge but I'm not too bottoered about that, I just need to print documents with black tetxt). All help welcome, please.

[Patrick]

Hi raymatsell,

When selecting grayscale, your PIXMA MP270 will combine all of the colors in the color ink cartridge to make that shade of gray.  If you are low on a certain color, your text will not print gray.  Please make sure that your PIXMA MP270's color ink cartridge is working correctly.

You can force your PIXMA MP270 to print using only the black ink cartridge. To print with the black cartridge only, please follow these steps:

 1.  Click on the Windows Start button (and then the Windows System folder if using Windows 10)

 2.  Click on Control Panel.

 3.  Click on View devices and printers.

 4.  Right click the Canon MP270 series printer and left click on Printer Properties.

 5.  Click on the Maintenance tab at the top.

 6.  Click on the Ink Cartridge Settings button.

 7.  Change to Black Only.

 8.  Click OK.

Your PIXMA MP270 will only print from the black cartridge.

[RMasiewicz]

This isn't a solution, it's a temporary work-around that's only useful if you don't need color AND black, which I very much do.

How do I get around this? As the original poster did, I also cleaned the printer, made sure my ink levels are fine, and I'd already done the switching to monochrome.

[raymatsell]

I’m the original poster. I did eventually get mine working again, after lots of cleaning passes of all the different types and replacing the cartridges with newly bought ones (compatibles, not CANON). Print quality is not great, good eniugh for everyday documents but not too god on photos which are always too dark compared with what is on screen. But I can live with that.