You will find in general, that the more you pay for a printer the cheaper the cartridges will be and vice versa
Theres a cheap Dell colour laser printer, that uses just about the cheapest colour toner ive ever come across (about £20 for all 4 toners), and has a remarkable reputation (tis sold on eBuyer for about £130).
Also, Kodaks are not particuarly expensive (reguarly see PC World and the like selling them for £30 or so) and yet they have the cheapest OEM cartidges on the market (in fact, that has been the USP of their range since they launched it a few years back).
So I think the idea that cheaper means more expensive is entirely flawwed.
Hiya, I'd also go for Epson all the time, You can go WiFi, The compatible inks are cheap etc etc. I've only used epson and wouldn't use anything else, that's why you see so many HPs, Canons, Lexmarks at carboot sales.
If you've only used Epson, then you can''t really comment on other printers can you?
Personally, ive had a lexmark (utter crap, expensive cartidges), Canon (very good but was BJC200 so many years ago before inkjets became commonplace), an Olivetti dot-matrix printer before that haha, a couple of Epsons after recommended by my father (okay printers, but found them to cheap built "on the cheap", quality not all there build-wise, and the stupid heads on the printer [the reason the compatible cartidges are so cheap] means they give no-end of problems as they get older), and finally, I have, for the past 3 printers, had HP - not had a problem, currently using a Deskjet 5550c and Photosmart 7450 - ink is fairly cheap on ebay for the genuine cartridges, and generally had little in the way of problems over the years. Also, currently have a Brother laser that I use for 99% of my printing and it beats any of the inkjets I have had hands-down - no fuss, fast as fook (20ppm), highest-quality, crisp and precise text and graphics everytime, never has problems taking extra pages of paper through etc, just sits there and kicks in when I need it (and the toner is about £16 and does around 2000 pages so it hardly ever needs replacing, even though I do a significant amount of printing [which has vastly increased since getting a laser]).