No inkjet printers work well when they are infrequently used. Every inkjet printer will spray ink into absorbent padding inside the printer when it goes a few days without printing in order to stop dried ink from clogging the print heads. On high end inkjets the padding is user replaceable (printer manufacturers refer to it as a “maintenance box”), and on low end models it’s sealed inside the printer and you have to throw the whole printer out when it becomes saturated with ink. This is why people who print infrequently will only get a few pages out of a cartridge. There’s a baseline consumption of ink that happens whether or not you use the printer. The smarter move for people who print infrequently is doing what you do, having a B&W laser printer (which doesn’t suffer from this problem) and getting color prints done at Kinko’s or something when you need them.

After having a few built-in printheads get messed up from non-use, aftermarket ink, planned obsolescence (or who knows what else), I regressed to a 20+ year old Deskjet 1220C which has the printheads in the ink cartridges themselves. It has been working fine with aftermarket cartridges, sometimes only printing a few times per year. But I know that if it does start having problems due to ink drying out, I won't have to mess with trying to clean built-in printheads and that getting a new cartridge will fix the problem completely.

No they are actually quite cheap considering how many pages you can get from a refill bottle.

Or is that the latest tactic in appearing human-written?