I found an HP Photosmart 3210 at a thrift store for under $8. Took it home because it had an Ethernet port. That was the only reason, really; I was sick and tired of having to turn on an aging PC running XP with a USB printer, and because it's XP and my other PCs are Win7, it wouldn't make an effective print server.
But I looked inside and saw no ink cartridges...and judging by the ink cartridge slots, they wouldn't come cheap. I didn't expect to be THAT right-turns out a full set of HP 02 cartridges costs $70 brand new, but before I could convince my mother to let me look somewhere other than retail, we bought them.
Fortunately, the whole thing works just fine despite a bad reputation for failures, although disabling the scanner portion just because of empty ink cartridges is STUPID. Also, something doesn't seem right about how some of the color ink gauges went from 100% to 66% all of a sudden. (Then there's the drivers. MY GOD, THE DRIVERS. HP sure knows how to bloat up their AIO printer drivers, and there's no PostScript support to get around that.)
Certainly a nice printer for the price I paid, even with official ink pricing firmly in wallet rape territory. Print speeds in draft mode rival lasers, photos look pretty nice (unless they get wet and the ink runs all over), and most importantly to me, it has an Ethernet port and its own integrated print server.
Incidentally, we've had a set of Stratitec ink refill bottles for years, just sitting around doing a whole lot of nothing, back when we were still using cheaper inkjets (and still bought official replacement ink cartridges for whatever reason; first a Canon printer, but when that would refuse to print reliably, we got some cheap, crappy Lexmark X2350 with these "1" cartridges that would run dry in no time flat...at $25 a pop). All the right colors for an HP 02 printer, too. Just need some cartridges with Auto-Reset Chips...but I have my concerns about that ink doing bad things to the ink lines or print head. (It's dye-based ink like HP's own, at least.)
Should I take the chance, or find some other refill ink to use instead?