In this video, a Canon print cartridge is opened up and revealed not to contain the meagre 11.9 ml (0.4 fl oz) of ink it is advertised. The proposed solution is to buy a printer designed to be manually refilled with bottles of ink (such as the featured Epson EcoTank ET-2850), though it has only been tested briefly.
I feel like a Brother laser printer is a much better solution unless you specifically need color. Also, if you try and print with a laser printer after a couple months of disuse, it should fire right up and print. The same is not necessarily true of an ink jet, where things may have dried out and clogged.
I agree, $100 for a simple b&w laser printer $200ish for color from them are as much as pretty much anyone needs and they’re stupid fast. Their software and toner management isn’t customer hostile yet at least.
I use a colour Brother laser printer. It works fine. Granted it’s not great for photos but those are cheaper to have printed in a lab, which will give much better results that an inkjet anyway.