buying a new printer

Is to make sure you get a printer that uses a different cartridge for each major color (black, cyan, magenta, yellow), this will allow you to purchase ink for only the colors you actually need and not throw away unused ink. Also, before purchasing, call the place where you will be buying ink from and find out how much they cost. There's nothing worse than finding out that that $75 printer you bought costs $60 to refill it's ink.

Avoid Lexmark, their inkjet printers are horrible quality (as in they break down too quickly). Also try and avoid HP printers, as the cost of ink for most HPs is sky high.

Canon and Epson are probably you're best bets these days.

-Darke

I would suggest shopping around to see what's involved in refilling the cartridges before getting the printer. If you do it yourself, you can refill a $40 cartridge for $3 worth of ink. In my experience, you can usually get 3-5 refills before the cartridge is too damaged an you lose quality.

Different brands have different levels of complexity in refilling. HP seems to be the easiest while Lexmark and Epson are the hardest. I have an HP photosmart which uses a fairly expensive cartridge, but they also make some low-end printers which take an identical, but lower capacity cartridge which is half the price (and 1/3rd the ink volume). Since it refills to the same capacity as the more expensive cartridge, it is a real bargain. If you're interested in refilling, you should keep an eye out for things like that when buying.

Even if you don't want to risk damaging your brand new printer, keep in mind the prices on printers drops very quickly because the model replacement cycles are very short. You might find that in a year a new ink cartridge is more expensive than the printer is worth to you, and you're more willing to give it a try.

Jason

Stores like that are a good option too. There's a kiosk that opened in a mall near me that refills cartridges on demand; drop it off, do some shopping, and pick up your same cartridge an hour later.

If I hadn't already gone to the trouble of learning how to to refill them and buying what now seems like a lifetime supply of ink from http://www.lsrk-enterprises.on.ca/ I'd probably have ended up using the kiosk.

I'll take your word for it that 123inkjets.com is good, but that is not the impression I get from their site. Every page I go to sends a pop-up asking for my email address so I can win $500 -- real professional. Also, the smaller cartridge for my printer (C8728AN) is only 15% off the MSRP of a new one to get one of their remanufactured ones.