It depends where and what brand of printer you buy. HP printers have a lot of 3rd party companies making huge ink cartidges. Instead of replacing a small cart, there are some places that make a special cart you put in the printer, there's a tube that gets ink from a large container and feeds that to the modified ink cart.

I like epson printing resolusions, but the cost of their replacement inks is like high and I think they use smart ink carts too.. where the printer detects the level of ink and if you manually refill it, it doesn't count it.. prevents the internal counter from printing from that refilled ink cart.

I often stick with canon printers now. When I did my Masters degree, I printed everything. PDF versions of the books, 500 pages on a weekend, my own papers, research articles. I easily did close to 800 pages a week for three years. Went through two canon printers... one because i could no longer find a replacement ink head when magenta got into the yellow.

Used to go to Sams Club wholesale place to buy replacement carts for about $19. Then I think they got some deal going with epson and started to sell their printers and stopped the refill things. Switched to walmart for refills, they have some for $6. There's an inkjet place in town.. "Mr Inkjet" which I've been wanting to try visiting for years. Hrm