High maintinance Printer!

It feels like every time that I go to print a page that it has a very hard time reading that the paper is there. I reload it and reload it, but it is work to get it to print. It was supposed to be a nice feature that the ink cartridges are all seperate, so that you only buy what you need, well-- they failed to mention that you cant print ANYTHING AT ALL,even black ink only if even ONE of the color cartridges are out! Plus, even when you do have all of the color cartridges in there and you select Black Ink only, they say that it still uses a little bit of the color ink anyway! So the " feature " is more wasteful since you cant even buy just one black cartridge to print black. It should be pretty simple. They make it more costly.