My wife and i were looking at ink cartridges tonite at Office Depot and the HP color cart no 17 (for my hp842c) is now $41 USD. what's a good cheap printer these days? I'd love to step up to a CISS but I'm willing to settle for one that sips ink instead of gulping it...

I would assume its the same in the US but "most" printers now are good and are reasonably priced. However they make there money hand over fist on the ink.

I found a site for the UK that does what they call refillable cartridges. These are designed to be filled easily and come with a staggering amount of ink.

This is the site http://www.cityinkexpress.co.uk/ im sure there will be a US equivilant. The initial outlay was about the same as 1.5 times the cost of a full set of ink cartridges for my printer.

Im very happy with them too

Hope you can get something similar.
Zero.

i think most everyone here does not use official ink sources. there are plenty of options here is a run down

refill your cartage
with this option you have to make sure you buy a printer that does not use some fancy chip protection to stop you from doing this, some printers will keep track and refuse to print from a re-filled cartage. you can refill it your self or some areas have refill shops, do whatever your comfortable with.

you can also try other approaches like CIS or working some place that has a printer and a friendly employee print policy.

I will caution against the HP 6000/6500 series of inkjets. The prints are good, but it guzzles ink. I have a 6500 and it sucks down ink like nobody's business. The XL cartridges say they'll get you 700 pages, but I don't think I even get to 100 when I'm printing WWG stuff.

I'm using a Fuji Xerox cp205w, a colour laser printer. The prints are great and with the starter toner I've gotten something like 50+ pages and it's just reported it's down to 80% so assuming this continues I'll be dry by ~250 pages. Their website states that the full toner cartridges will give around 1400 pages and the starters are about half that; time will tell about the longevity, but the prints are terrific.

Of course, a full refill is $300 ($400 with black) and the printer costs $230 so...

My 6500 uses the 920 series of cartridges. So, you must be thinking of a different model.

Don't discount the price of shipping on lasers. I was SHOCKED at how big a box mine came in and how heavy. You'd think it was an old crt monitor or something. Luckily I bought a reconditioned brothers 4040cn from staples and it was delivered to me free. With cartidges included $200.

But when I first started I was using 2 borthers: 240c & 3360c. Both of which used the same cartidges. For which I was able to buy generics online in a bundle(4black, 2 yellow, 2 cyan, 2 magenta) for $40! I used that for years, and it was cheap enough for me to keep bubilding even when I was out of work. NOT color fast though. Both printers were among the ones that print some WW sets DARK. I don't remember all the sets but hinterland was one.

How do you like your reconditioned 4040 for printing WWG stuff?