No. All cartridges must be installed. That being said, you may operate a TR4500 printer with an empty color cartridge installed. All you have to do is to hold down the “stop” button for about 8 seconds and that will dismiss the low or empty ink warning and allows you to continue printing with the black tank. If you are using Windows or Mac OS, you can go into the maintenence section of the drivers and tell your computer to print in black only. This will cause colored images to be printed black only.