Of course they also use Black however we will discuss this later. The 3 main colours used by your inkjet printer are Cyan (Bluey Colour), Magenta (Reddish Colour) and Yellow. I do not know enough to state as fact, but there are times after a cartrige change where it can go Dry after printing a few full print pages, and still require a head cleaning to get the ink back down.Is your printer producing the correct colours that it should be? If not it is easy to isolate the problem by using a Test Page. It might not be fully 'primed' anyway, depending on how it ran out. Other notes: Even if a nozzel check works, or a test page works, there is no guarentee that the thing will print 10 full color pages after that. Always make sure you park your heads/cartrige (turn off) on the printer before pulling the power on it. I feel it is better to keep your inkjet printer printing a few pages a week, instead of drying out, because of the head cleaning taking so much ink. Notes: Using CIS or cheap inks does have a tendancy to clog more, and I would not recommend them for minor use (pita it is). A nozzel check uses a very very small ammount of ink, and can represent all aspects of operation quickly. If your printer uses a nozzel check it would be better than a test page, because it uses every jet in the thing to print. If you have spare paper that you have used already, but would throw out, you could print a test page, or a nozzel check, or anything else you want, without fear that it will drain your carts, as much as a head cleaning would. The ammount of ink used for a head cleaning, or multiple head cleanings does not even compare to printing an entire page of a colorful print.

I use a CIS (continuous ink system) for more than one epson printers, and I can tell you for sure, it is the 'Head Cleaning' itself that uses the most ammount of ink by far.

Print test page online