Do printer manufacturers do any scenario testing?

We do a thing called "Scenario Testing" where we run through common end-user scenarios to make sure they work from end to end. This is like the antithesis of unit testing. The reason is that often each single component does the right thing, but when you put them all together, you realize the results weren't quite what you expected.

That leads to my question: Do printer manufacturers do any scenario testing?

Here's why I ask: My wife + I recently bought a color printer (Epson Stylus Photo R300). It prints great color photos.  However, it ran out of color ink and now can't print just black + white documents. The irony is that it even explicitly has a configurations page that lets us request "Black+White" documents (as opposed to "Photo quality", "Color", etc).

As an end-user, I'd expect a printer to be able to print black and white documents without requiring red ink.  This is especially useful since ink costs more than the printer. Thus it would be cheaper for us to just get a simple black and white printer.

So this leaves me with the following question: Do they just not do scenario testing on printers? Or is it just a marketing ploy to force you to buy more ink?