Black colour in console is actually dark grey

[Mark]

A default Ubuntu installation runs setvtrgb to set the console (virtual terminal) palette to that specified in /etc/console-setup/vtrgb

/etc/console-setup/vtrgb is provided by the package console-setup-linux. Its contents look like this:
1,222,57,255,0,118,44,204,128,255,0,255,0,255,0,255
1,56,181,199,111,38,181,204,128,0,255,255,0,0,255,255
1,43,74,6,184,113,233,204,128,0,0,0,255,255,255,255

For some reason, the (should-be-black) background colour is set to #010101, i.e. very dark grey. Is that by accident or was there some rationale for doing that?

To fix it and make "black" *actually* black, edit /etc/console-setup/vtrgb, replacing the 1s at the start of each line with 0s:
0,222,57,255,0,118,44,204,128,255,0,255,0,255,0,255
0,56,181,199,111,38,181,204,128,0,255,255,0,0,255,255
0,43,74,6,184,113,233,204,128,0,0,0,255,255,255,255