These days there's going on a movement in the ink cartridge world as major printer and cartridge manufacturers like Hewlett-Packard (HP), Epson, Lexmark, Canon see their market-share for ink cartridges steadily decrease. Which is caused by the cheaper non-genuine brand ink cartridges preferred by a lot of printer users. Probably most consumers find the prices for genuine printer brand cartridges too high and therefore prefer to buy cheaper third-party ink cartridges or remanufactured printer ink cartridges.

Industry leader Hewlett-Packard now approaches chain stores, probably offering them better conditions if they agree to more aggressively market the HP printer ink cartridges and stop or reduce their efforts to supply their customers with third-party replacement printer ink cartridge products. Hewlett-Packard tries to convince consumers that it is better for the printer to use genuine HP cartridges. Sounding like a real warning that it may be bad for your printer if users print with other than Hewlett-Packard's ink cartridges. But a lot of consumers don't buy that and are not willing to pay for the over-priced genuine ink cartridges. Especially not when the non-genuine ink cartridge manufacturers and suppliers guarantee an ink and print quality that matches that of OEM ink cartridges. Here's an example to choose e.g. HP deskjet F380 ink cartridges.

Lexmark tried to stop the manufacturing of certain cartridge components with the argument that it is a violation of their intellectual property. But they failed on that.

Epson did it a little different than Lexmark and focuses on infringements of their patents. This approach resulted in winning preliminary ruling against third-party ink cartridge manufacturers.

And then there's Kodak, claiming to be the world’s foremost imaging innovator. They say that for far too long, people have felt restrained from printing due to the high cost of ink, and also refer to a study that indicates the cost of ink and supplies as the greatest obstacle to print at home.
"We are changing the rules in this industry to ensure that consumers can affordably print what they want, when they want, easily and at the high level of Kodak quality they’ve come to expect" says CEO of Eastman Kodak Company.

With their new system - the EasyShare 5000 All-in-One printers - Kodak thinks that the printer ink market will never be the same and claims that consumers can print the same number of pages at half the cost of other consumer inkjet printers. Their pigment-based black ink cartridge is priced $10 and their five-ink color cartridge af $15 (US MSRP = Manufacturer's Suggested Retail Price).
They indicate that a 4 x 6-inch photo costs as little as 10 cents per print when applying the KODAK Photo Value Pack.

As the new Kodak printer models may not be available yet, you can find info on Kodak Printer Inkjet Refill Cartridges here.

Kodak, EasyShare, and Kodacolor are trademarks of Eastman Kodak Company.