My Frustration with Home Printing

I'm so frustrated with HP. A few years ago, I bought our HP Officejet 6210 All-in-One. It was missing ink cartridges, worth around $50. HP Support replaced them, but I had to buy cartridges in the mean time. On March 1, the printer quit working because the under-used color cartridge presumably dried up. I rarely print color documents on this printer, why should I have to have a color cartridge to print a 'black cartridge only' document? I replaced the cartridge and printing resumed. Today I got a message that the color cartridge is "not intended for use in this printer"; the same cartridge that has been installed since March, that I used last week to print two pages of business cards. Again, I cannot print black and white documents. After a little bit of research, I learned that the cartridge had a warranty, which expired in February of 2008. I don't think I even owned the printer cartridge in February of 2008, but even if I did, the receipt is long gone. With older printers, I used to buy aftermarket print cartridges, but I had problems with print heads clogging. So I bought two printers, one for photos and one for documents. I stuck to buying the overpriced name-brand cartridges and I had relatively few issues for quite awhile. What I've found though, is that if you don't use your printer frequently, and you don't store it in a temperature-controlled, humidity-controlled, dust-controlled environment, you end up throwing away money on these print cartridges. So I'm switching back to buying aftermarket cartridges. Gone are the days where I worried about fading photos, clogged print heads, or banding. I'm sending my photos to Target Photo, or Walgreens, or Shutterfly. Really important documents can be sent to FedEx Office^SM Print Online(formerly Kinko's).