New printers come with "starter" cartridges good for maybe 50 sheets, Swifty.
I get cartridges from NEEDINK.COM and so far they've been perfectly compatible with both an HP and a Brother printer, work fine, and cost a lot less.
Correct, new printers ship with starter cartridges. This is done to keep the initial printer cost lower. Starter cartridges, as they are called by the industry, have about 1/3 the capacity of new cartridges.
We, I mean HP, ran extensive testing of aftermarket and refilled Laserjet cartridges and our test concluded they delivered a higher overall cost solution when you measure the actual cartridge life, include failures. Failures are expensive in both time and materials. OEM cartridges delivered the best option for businesses, home users are more willing to absorb the additional time and overhead associated with aftermarket and refilled cartridges. This information is about 10 years old and of course some things may have changed.
Cartridge life is calculated on a 5% page coverage using a scrolling E pattern. Some manufacturers, like Lexmark, cheated the yield test by printing with excessively large borders. There was no industry standard for measuring cartridge life when I retired. Toner yield is a linear response; directly proportional to coverage - within the limits of this discussion. There are some nuisances that will affect this but they are at the limit of use.
Throwing away a printer when it runs out of ink is a costly decision. Cost per page will be higher than replacing the cartridges. We do look at this option before ever releasing a new printer.
Canon laser printers are the same as HP except they have different controllers and software. HP's image rendering has been consistently better.
Epson makes an excellent liquid ink printer with superb image rendering. The trade off is image accuracy. People see things different than they really are, preferring a more colorful rich image. Facial recognition is used to pump up the facial color. Business graphics need to have lots of punch. Memory colors like grass and sky are 'adjusted' towards memory colors and not the true image. This makes for images preferred by end users. Yep, we completed tons of testing in this area also.
My name is on a series of Patents describing the likely direction of the printing future.
