I'm sure my comments will be misunderstood and may offend some people who think I'm an arrogant bastard, but in the words of the great Ron Jeremy, "Fuck 'em", I like being helpful, and this is something I've had experience with in the past.
There's two main types of printer inks, dyes and pigments, generally only black is dye or pigments, the colors are almost always dye based. Pigment pings do not stick well to glossy and are good for use on matte paper. It's not just the ink though, but also the paper itself. Some will pretty much only accept dye inks. So what I'm betting happened to you, most of the colors looked ok, but the black was all bubbled and washed out?
To make it worse, the pigment blacks come in two types, an MK and PK. It's mostly Epson printers that use these, the PK is for photos, the MK is for matte. The PK has extra to make it stick to photo better, but that means less ink for the page.
Now for the trick: depending on the printer, some printers use a pigment black for text\matte, and a dye black for photos, OR, mixes the other inks into a black. This is sometimes controlled by the paper type options, so selecting photo\glossy MAY cause it to print using the colored dyes, depends on the printer.
