Excellent quality print but proprietary unreliable ink cartridges

I bought an ip4300 new on ebay for a great deal, about $80 plus shipping. I also have an IP3000 printer which I love since like the ip4300 it has two paper trays (I keep labels in one and paper in the other) and most importantly, non-proprietary cartridges which I could get cheap, as little as a dollar each. When my son needed a new printer, I gave him the ip3000 and got the ip4300 for myself.

I got the ip4300 thinking it would be the same as the ip3000 but was surprised that it had proprietary cartridges that cost about $80 per set, as much as I paid for the printer. But the worse thing is even with my original cartridges still all about 90% full, I get cartridge errors on one or two of them almost every time I print. I have to remove them and put them back in to clear the error, a real hassle.

Even though I still have the cartridges all near full, I went ahead and purchased an ip4000 printer on ebay. The ip4000 model is discontinued but you can still occasionally find a new one on ebay. They use the same cartridges as the ip3000, ones you can get cheap. The problem is that the ip4000 and ip3000 cost between $200 and $800 even though the original list price was $150. Such is the value of a good printer with non-proprietary cartridges. Once again I can print to my heart's content and not worry about the cost of ink or getting errors caused by the stupid ip4300 cartridges.