Sounds to me like your heads want cleaning. Have a look in the instruction manual about "Cleaning" or "Troubleshooting print" problems. It might be a manual job or there might be an automatic facility on it.
You sometimes need to clean the heads several times, particularly if you haven't used the printer for a while. It's one of the drawbacks with inkjet printers. It's free to try it again.
That's the very reason I gave up with inkjets about 10 years ago. Mine always seemed to play up when I needed it and I reckoned I spent more cartridge money cleaning it than using it. Laserjets are more expensive to but but more reliable and cheaper in the long run.
If there's a 'deep clean' option, as well as the normal 'clean' one, use that. If you still can't print, keep on using it. It's sometimes taken me around ten or a dozen cleaning cycles to fix the problem (although 3 or 4 more commonly do so), so don't give up!
Ah thanks Chris - I did give up - cos I went into maintenance and it came up - black was empty. Anyway put in a new one in and it said empty too. Have sent away for more - I did have those from 2015.