Some printers will require you to have all color cartridges in order for the printer to work. Although it doesn’t make sense to have the Magenta, Yellow, or Cyan cartridges in the printer when printing in black and white, but the printer will not function if any of the cartridges are either empty or removed from the printer.

There are several reasons for this. Your printer actually does not use a true black, it needs all the other colors to darken and sharpen the black. This allows better picture and text quality and ensures higher quality photos; however there is a trouble when trying to print in black and white only.

Your printer comes with an integrated print head which heats and cools rapidly while printing. In order to protect the print head from getting damaged, the print head must be fueled with a small amount of ink each time you do your printing job. This acts as a coolant protecting your print head from damage when printing. If the printer machine has to continue printing, print jobs and cleaning cycles would take in air from the empty cartridge and damage the print head.

However, some printer brand, like Brother, exceptionally can operate in Black and White mode even when one or more color ink cartridges are empty. When any of the color cartridges are empty, an error message will be displayed on the screen of the machine stating “B & W Print Mode Only Replace Ink”. Thus, you can print using only the black ink cartridge when the Color cartridges have run out.