What do you suggest? Ink needs to be cheap. It's ok selling printers for £50 but when a set of in cartridges cost £30 it's hardly a bargain is it?
Makes sense to just buy a new printer every time the ink runs out. Have you thought about a laser printer? The prices have come down significantly.
I went the colour laser printer route years ago. Toner is expensive to replace but tI am still on the initial OEM ones. Also quality and speed is better than ink jets. Not cheap initially though.
Bit of lateral thinking needed here, I always buy the same printer as we have at work.....................
a lot depends on your budget and your needs: if you only need B&W, then you can get good laser for reasonably low price. The advantage they have is that their toner last for a long long time (but more expensive than a black ink cartridge. They need next to no maintenane. I have a kyocera bought in the late 90's still printing on original toner! then: scanner/ copying? network connection? duplex printing? I had a top end HP photo printer/ fax/ modem. The performance was good but: their software was crap, caused a lot of headache with anti virus &windows firewall and in the end the did not support win 7 not to mention it kept getting lost on the network! the nail in the coffin was that if left unused for a few weeks, the inkjets would dry up and as you mentioned, expensice to replace. I retired the HP in favour of epson which I cannot fault. It has had no ink drying issues when left unused for 3 months. Mine is a workforce range (maybe OTT for home use but on promo at under £200 it was a bargain!). Reliable and dependable and I cannot praise the usefulness of double sided printing enough.
mine is WF-4630 but I think it is now superceeded paid under £170 with 3 years on site warranty! You do need good space for it. If you are into very high resolution colour photo printing, you'd better compare its color res to others