I bought a cheap Canon inkjet and have started refilling it with cheap off-brand ink. It’s not particularly as good as the original ink, but for my purposes it works great.

Commercial printer here. I have 60" wide printers of pigment, latex and UV inks currently and can answer whatever questions you might have about this industry. I but 700ml cartridges for the aqueous and latex inks, and 1L bottles for UV pour over. Feel free to AMA. :)

Another for the get a laser printer train, I got a Xerox color laser printer 8 years ago for a ridiculously good deal (like $130). I finally had to replace the original toner last year, and it took my off brand cartridges just fine at a cost of like $50 for the full set of four. Came with Linux drivers even! Having color is nice too, means I don’t have to think about using another printer. We keep my boyfriend’s inkjet printer around solely for scanning things at this point.

I love my mono laser printer. It’s an older Canon I got from a retired lawyer, so it has probably printed a million pages already for all I know. Haven’t had to futz with it since I popped in a new toner cartridge that was ~$40. If I need to print color, I go to the local copy store, but that’s rare anyways. Been recommending the same for all my friends and family.

I use my HP printer infrequently enough that every time I booted up my inkjet, I had to put it through a printer head cleaning cycle. I’d be surprised if I got more than 20 sheets of paper for each cartridge do to the wasted ink, and the dang thing malfunctioned frequently even after cleaning (streaks, blots, complaining about missing colors when printing b/w, etc).

After switching to a Brother mono laser, I haven’t had to do any maintenance in 3 years and it’s still on the original toner cart which it came with.

This is the way.