WARNING: Don't buy an ink tank printer unless you are printing documents on a daily or at least weekly basis. For occasional uses, it's the worst choice - dried ink will completely clog the printer head, even running multiple "flush" cannot fully declog it. For an ink-cartridge based printer, the head is replaced after each cartridge replacement, but with an ink tank printer, the broken lines will stay with you forever.
Also, an ink tank printer also includes a planned obsolescence feature: waste ink pad counter. For each "flush" operation, the counter increments. When it reaches a threshold, it will disable the printer and force you to send the printer back for maintenance (effectively making many people to throw out the printer). Occasional users suffer the most, since flushing the printer is needed all the time to declog it. The waste ink pad is not something magic, it's just a sponge pad and trivially replacable, but manufacturer won't tell you in the user manual and won't let you reset the counter after replacement. Fortunately, you can find the leaked OEM tool on the web.
Laser printing is the way to go. Unfortunately a color printer is still 3x more expensive than an equivalent inkjet printer.
Hint for declogging cartridge printers: use isopropyl alcohol on third party cleaning cartridges.
Only use genuine ink cartridge for actually refilling the head, unless you really really care about color reproduction, otherwise you’ll be wasting it completely just to declog.
For waste ink pads: google how to do it at home for your printer. I’ve heard it’s a mess but often can be done and counter reset.
Epsons tend to use solvent based inks, so alcohol works well for cleaning. Others may use water-based ink, where water is suitable for cleaning, and steaming a print head over a pot of boiling water works well for stubborn clogs.
I think it's just HP who have the heads built into the cartridge which is partly why they cost so much. Canon just uses the same head until it wears out or clogs. But yes inkjets like to be used regularly.
It was glorious. They had big transparent tanks full of ink and my printing costs reduced drastically.
Refilling was dead easy and dead cheap.
It changed the market overnight. Other manufacturers followed suit.
I guess the change happened because laser printers were becoming cheap and inkjets were losing market share.