Can I print in greyscale when the color cartridges are empty?

go to printer settings and select black and white only
however as the printer is running color cartridges and they are empty you will always get that message
it is not a good idea to run the printer with empty cartridges

Try greyscale printing

You need to have the color cartridge installed. There is no software way to avoid that.

No, Canon does not have this facility. Also mostly greyscale is not light black but rather a mixcture of the 3 primary colours. You should have a reset/resume button on the printer - hold this in for a slow 5 seconds to de-activate ink warnings per cartridge that is giving alarms. Proceed carefully and only print text that is black so that the colour printheads do not burn out.

You can't really "shut off" the color ink with this printer, but you can trick it. If you rarely or never print in color you can put in a full black cartridge and keep your empty color cartridge in the printer. As long as the electronics are still good on the color cartridge your printer will print and won't use any color. You can also set your printer properties to greyscale.

HP printers use a little bit of color ink, even if you only print in black. This is done by HP inorder to keep the color printhead jets clear.

You can select "greyscale only" by clicking on [Preferences] and going to the advanced screen. Choose "use greyscale only".

When you print a color page, the printer will only print black/grey. However ... it will still use a tiny bit of each color ink.

Oh, yeah .. they make lots of money, too.

The color cartridges print text that appears black by mixing the three primary colors (cyan, magenta, and yellow) to make composite black. To achieve a realistic black, large quantities of colored ink are used. Because black cartridges use much less ink to create a similar shade of black, they print more pages in black than the color cartridge.
If the color cartridges on the printer are next to empty, you will not be able to get perfect prints at all.

Please have the cartridges replaced to do the printing jobs again.

Check the black toner cartridge. Most printers that use multiple cartridges will use the black cartridge as long as it has toner in it but will then start using the color toner to do the black/grayscale when the black cartridge is empty.

-Graye-

Do this, press and hold the "Stop" button on the printer for 10 seconds that should clear the fault set by the empty ink cartridge.