You can pick up a cheap Epson printer for peanuts these days, but don’t be fooled by the cheap purchase price because you may end up paying more in the long run. All printer manufacturers, not just Epson, don’t see a printer as a profit making sale because its a one off sale, they see the replacement printer ink cartridges as the “bread & butter” for making profits. This means the cost of ink cartridges can be almost as much as the printer itself. As a reaction to consumers not being happy with the cost of ink cartridges Epson started to offer full sets of inks in multi-pack at a small discount, but no where near enough of a discount in order to stop people from buying cheaper products from third party manufacturers. These products known as compatible ink cartridges offer the same amount of ink and almost as good print quality as the genuine Epson ink cartridges but at half the price. As an example the Epson Stylus Photo R360 takes six cartridges and a set of genuine Epson inks costs around £45 but a set of compatible Epson R360 ink cartridges costs just £15. If Epson really want to convince consumers to buy and use genuine inks in their printers they may want to reconsider their sell the printer cheap and make high profits on the ink, sales strategy.