Sorry, you should have waited a wee bit and purchased the Epson Stylus Pro 4800 which replaces the 4000 and has full B&W printing capability.

If black and white is your highest concern, you may want to try and return the 4000 until you can get a 4800. If that's not possible, I suggest looking into one of the RIPs that are available. In particular, I've had very good results with ColorByte Software's ImagePrint

wait,are you saying that this printer WILL NOT print true black? that is ridiculous! we have the epson 3000 and that prints black amazingly. we also have the 10600 and that prints black as well.

is this some sort of glitch in this model or something??
when does the 4800 come out anyway?

None of the UltraChrome printers (2200, 4000, 7600, 9600) are known for producing true neutral blacks. This and the metamerism issues are the biggest complaints people have with UltraChrome. Can it be done? Sure, but it takes quite a bit of experimentation with driver settings and image preperation. Using a RIP makes all of this easier.

thanks so much for your help.
pardon my lack of technical jargon, but what does RIP stand for? we currently use ImagePrint for our epson 10600...does that really make a difference in printing quality? if so, how or why? thanks again for your help.

RIP stands for Raster Image Processor. They work by talking directly to the printer, bypassing the print driver supplied with your printer. ImagePrint gets better black and whites by controlling the amount of ink and the number of colors of ink used. I wrote a review of ImagePrint a while back for Shutterbug, perhaps this will help you out.
Shutterbug Test Reports

this is really helpful! thanks so much. i forwarded the link to our IT dept so hopefully we'll be printing out blacks in no time!

Having the same problems. Epson 4000, using ImagePrint 6. Anything with the photo black prints fine, but whenever I try printing with a Matte Black (Hahnemuhle Photo Rag, Smrst Vlvt) it's never a 'rich' black, more a dark grey. Any help?

Hi Everyone,
I've been using the 2200 and the 4000, both with image print RIP software. Generally the black density has been very good.
Concerning the black density in Matte printing, it does have something to do with the actual matte paper profiles. IP has some issues with their fine art matte profiles. I just recently printed some work for a photographer who brought prints with her that had been printed with custom profiles through IP. These prints looked much richer and more dense, than the profiles offered directly by IP. I was quite surprised to find out that many people still custom profile their paper while using IP as the driver.

Has anyone got a response as to why people can't print true black on the 4000.
Does the matte black cartridge need to be full when using the 4000? At the moment i don't need it so there is only a empty cartridge sitting there (full chip)