completely black type face

Uh... yeah.

Here's the deal: the default Material > "Substance" for 3D Text is "Plastic" with Type: Shiny. There is a built in shininess to the plastic Material. To get a true black, you have to change the Substance to Generic and set the Color to Black.

On the flip side, the Plastic Shiny White is actually quite near white (about 95-98%), but the Generic White is affected by Lighting (there is a Brightness slider you can use to increase the white to "beyond white"! 100% brightness looks like about 80% white.

Here is an example of what I'm talking about:

The "space" under 2D Black is actually the text "3D Black" set to Color Black... as you can see, it is *really* black.

EDIT: You can use the Generic > Brightness slider **on ANY color** to turn the text to Black by setting it to 0.

Set the Substance with the popup in the Materials section:

3D Text takes a little bit of gettin' used to...

Building on what Fox has shared, you can also change some of the lighting settings in the 3D Text. By default there are two lighting settings on all new text object. First is the Lighting Style, second is the Environment. The Environment will have a significant impact on the shiny (specular) parts of a surface. In fact, you pretty much need this element to truly make things look highly reflective in Motion (chrome, glass, etc.). Reducing or completely removing the shiny or component will help, but can make your text look a little more flat. It can be worth lowering the shininess and lowering the Environment intensity as well, or using a flat colored gradient for the environment and then adjusting the intensity.

Playing with the lighting may help to balance things as well. As Fox hints at 3D lighting and materials have a bit of complexity to them, but once you understand the full tool set, you can get amazing results.