Credit to everyone who is trying to recycle their ink cartridges, but I still have concerns about these printers and their consumables. Ink jet printers are just plain hard on the budget and the environment, and the cartridges can't be refilled indefinitely, many only once and very few more than two or three times. Many applications don't really need an ink jet, I see lots of these printers being used in places where a laser or dot matrix would be much better suited to the job. Often people buy them because the initial printer cost is very low, frequently because it's heavily subsided by the expensive cartridges, sometimes the printer is sold for less than a full set of cartridges. However, when you consider the price of ink and special paper, it's multiple times cheaper to take your digital photographs or images to a shop and have them use their state of the art printer worth thousands to print them for you. No need to clutter up your house with another printer, no need to change cartridges or anything. Best of all it's not more work, you can either go out to the store to buy cartridges or you can go to the store to have your pictures printed. The only major difference is price and quality, both of which are better. Some places do it mail order or over the internet now, so you could have your prints sent to you. Of course some people do need a colour printer at home or in their office, there are genuine needs, but then it's fair to point out that the price of colour laser printers has dropped a lot now, and they're much better suited to high volume applications, but also don't dry up if not used for a while. They also work out much cheaper in the long term. Anyone who can justify their need for a high quality colour printer, for example a high volume of prints being made, can probably justify the initial expense of a colour laser as it will save them so much money in the long term.

I never used any of the store-bought ones but tried one from a local business that does them. Actually, I tried two. The first wouldn't work at all. The second did a miserable print job. I do printing as a business, and WYSWYG is very important, but the pictures printed terribly. The colors were waaaay off. He told me mine was their best seller, so I cannot account for other people liking it except to say most just want something printed out. While it is extremely important to me, it doesn't matter to everyone what the printout looks like. I should point out mine are HP printers and I so very much wish I could get ink for less than these outrageous prices. Additionally, the printers in the last 4 or 5 years are made to consume more ink, while the cartridges are filled with less ink. I would suggest you try it to determine for yourself. Usually, the costs are low enough for one experiment at least. Also, you can purchase the ink in bottles and do the re-filling yourself. My cousin has been doing that for years.

Looks like their prices are about the same as Staples. I have to remember to take my used cartridges back. I just bought a pack of three cartridges and they cost $42. Ridiculous! Thanks for the link.

Ok...let me take these questions in order....LOL Mare wbpa I do not have to use Kodak paper, but if I use any paper other than Kodak I have to run a test print to do the setup to match the printer to the paper, but that test page is common to all the other printers I have ever used. The advantage with the kodak paper is that kodak has printed a bar code on the back side of the paper that is read by the printer and it automatically does the setup. For my purposes that is extremely handy because I often switch from Glossy, to Ultra-glossy or Matt and I don't have to mess with test prints, just pop in the paper I want and it works perfect. I find that at Staples there is a substantial difference in price between the kodak paper and the HP or generic, but at Walmart the Kodak 100 sheet pack of 4x6 paper is about $8 which is about $1 more than the HP amd the 8.5 x 11 is about $3 more per 100 sheets and believe it or not, the price of photo paper at walmart is cheaper than what you can find on ebay. Now in regards to print quality. I have on three occassions printed 6 prints on this printer, then had the same prints printed at Walmart photo center & staples photo center, then we laid the prints out side by side to see which looked better, and in all instances even the photo techs running the photo centers agreed they like the kodak prints better. jasdip,,, I don't know what model of kodak printer your stepfather has, but I have the kodak ESP 7250 all in one, printer scanner and I have never encountered any problem with the printer stopping, In fact, I have printed right down to were a print comes out missing the black or one of the colors. The printer does have a service monitor that keeps track of the ink level and when a cartridge gets down to 1/3 it will post a popup window that informs you that it is low on ink and reminding you to order a new cartridge, but it does not stop printing. For plain paper copies I don't buy printer paper. I buy the cheap $2.50/ream copier paper and when I print a document that has a photo the photo even comes out looking good on the cheap copier paper. Another thing I really like is that the ink is completely dry and the photos are ready to handle as soon as they come out of the printer. Another thing I like is that this printer has two paper trays..you can put 4x6 or 5x7 in the top tray and 8x10 or 8.5x11 in the bottom tray and you just select the size of print you want when you send the photo to the printer.