[sly010]

FWIW ink is not expensive, but traditionally the nozzles and electronics and the printhead are all bundled with the cartridge, making it expensive. The big companies now offer inkjet printers with ink and print head separate (eg Canon pixma) and for those printers the ink (in a literal bottle) is priced much more reasonably.

There are other issues of course, I am not trying to give them slack here. If you don't use self cleaning once a week, the printer head clogs and you have to replace it anyway. If you use self cleaning too much, the waste ink reservoir fills up and your whole printer is toast unless you reset the firmware somehow. But there is a whole community for those kind of things.

[Clamchop]

> traditionally the nozzles and electronics and the printhead are all bundled with the cartridge

Canon at least was selling individual ink tanks (by the color, no integrated head) for their BubbleJet printers way back in the 90s.