Useless HP printers

If you ever consider a printer where you will use mostly black ink, DO NOT BUY an officejet. If any of your color cartridges is depleted, you cannot print only with black ink even if your printer is set up to use only black ink. I have bought new cartridges directly from HP SA and then suddenly my printer leaked ink like crazy. The Magenta and Cayn are depleted, the yellow just about empty and even the BIG black cartridge is halfway even though I only printed a few "black ink only" pages. I phoned them and they just informed me that the printers are set up and programmed like that and there is nothing you can do about it. So now, I cannot print any documents and I just don't have the money to buy cartridges every few pages. They also don't have people to service it unless I send it to Johannesburg, which is almost 200km away from me. So now I am stuck!!!!!