They use ink to clean the heads. They say empty when they’re not. The cartridges that come with the printer aren’t full. There is a constant firmware update war to defeat third party cartridges for obvious reasons.
Buy a tank printer that you fill with ink bottles.
Except fucking Dymo did: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2022/02/worst-timeline-printer...
On plus side choosing which brand label printer to buy was very simple...
I did that with an HP inkjet - got me out of trouble until it ran out, then I replaced with a Brother laser that was half of what the ink refills for the HP would have been. Toner for the Brother is like 20 bucks and lasts for a couple of years given my level of usage.
Even the starter Brother laser toner prints for ages.
Laser printers are far more cost-effective than ink printers, and there are even color laser printers with very decent color quality for everything except photos. (Ink printers are better for photos but even I think those look terrible compared to professionally-developed photos.)
BTW, a cool modern hack is converting a document to high-res image files and then submitting the images to the Walmart photo printing service or similar. The document will look incredible.