Here's the thing you come to realize as the owner of a 3D printer: Ink cartridges are expensive for a good reason. Printing is hard. 2D printers are amazing. Yo

Here's the thing you come to realize as the owner of a 3D printer: Ink cartridges are expensive for a good reason. Printing is hard. 2D printers are amazing. You can feed in cheap paper that's been sitting in a humid environment and they work very reliably. We get frustrated when they don't work because it's unexpected. There are a whole bunch of different factors that go into something as simple as 2D printing. For example, what are the physical characteristics of the paper? Are the sheets stuck together? Is it too thick for the rollers to pick up? Are the edges within good enough tolerance that it'll move in a straight line through the printer? And then ink (for an inkjet printer) is a whole other level of chemistry and materials science. You have a suspension of pigment in a solution that has to reliably form consistent sized droplets that get sprayed out of microscopic holes in the printhead onto the paper, and stick there. What if the ink is too viscous for the holes? What if the holes are clogged? The end-user doesn't want to worry about these things, they just want to print. So you end up packaging the ink into sealed containers with the printhead built in so that in theory the end user never has to worry about these issues as long as the cartridge is reasonably fresh. So why are they so expensive? Because people don't want to spend a lot of money on a machine they only see themselves using occasionally. So if they buy a printer, they will generally buy the cheapest one that fits their needs. That means if a printer manufacturer wants to sell printers to the average consumer, they need to compete with their competitors on price, which is a race to the bottom. So the printer manufacturers figure that they'll sell the printer at a loss and make the sales up on ink cartridges. In reality, the reason that inkjet printing is so expensive is because a ton of complexity is abstracted away from the average consumer. Laser printers win because they're in a different category of technology than inkjets, so consumers are willing to overlook the high price because it's a laser printer. Combined with the fact that toner expires much more slowly than ink, and drums and other laser printer parts generally wear much longer, and laser printers end up with a better reputation. These problems have not yet been solved for consumer 3D printers. The best you can do is buy a reliable printer (like a Prusa) and then buy good quality filament that has been tested with that printer (like Prusament) and then follow all the instructions very carefully. But if you buy a cheap printer and cheap filament then you start to realize why good quality stuff is expensive. The reason why commercial and industrial printers are so expensive is because businesses don't want to mess around with tweaking their printers constantly, they just want them to work. Which is the same as most consumers want out of their 2D printers, which is why they're perceived to be so expensive, when in actuality they are surprisingly affordable for what they do and how accurately they do it.