> Wait, do you know that most printers have the ability to clean these clogs (by wasting a large chunk of the ink)? You don't really need to throw the cartridge away. This is why I say that printing the rated amount of pages is difficult, since these cleanup operations waste a large chunk of the ink.
That sometimes works. The last HP I bought, cartridges would easily start choking after a few months of non-use, and no amount of cleaning would stop prints from having soft lines/etc. Unfortunately my printing was so infrequent that I'd be lucky to get 50 pages out of a cartridge.
The only environment where I've seen Inkjet cartridges actually 'get fully used' in the last 15 years or so has been in CAD. [0]
Compare and contrast to my Father, who goes through ebbs and flows of printing. Since switching to Brother, his overall 'ink/toner' costs have gone down since there's less waste, also Brother drivers are a bit less offensive than HP.
[0] - I'll add that while the quality of HP Plotters went down substantially between the era of the OG DesignJet 750C and the DesignJet 4000. Sure, the latter was faster, had a way nicer spittoon setup[1] and separate nozzle/ink cartridges, but had a number of design issues that prevented any real use of batch plotting. Any time we did a large series of prints unsupervised it would wind up feeding output back in and jamming the whole thing. [2]
[1] - Tl;dr- where excess ink went between jobs. Part of me wonders if the lack of such bits in consumer printers leads to more clogged nozzles.
[2] - Nothing like telling your boss your print job broke a 2 week old printer that cost almost as much as the compact sedan you bought a couple years prior...
