Not surprising. Ink prices have been getting worse as time goes on. The general purpose Espon all-in-one printer we have in the house for day to day use gets through its ink carts really quickly. They only cost about £11 for the black and £14 for a set of the colour carts, but they are really small, and I reckon printing A4 images they would be empty after 20 sheets.

My professional HP A3 printer was also starting to cost way too much to run. It takes 8 ink cartridges, and a whole set of 8 would cost at least £160. They are however very large cartridges and would easily print 100's of photos before needing replacement.

But the printer also eats the ink even when not being used as it is required to be left on all the time, and performs a daily cycle to run ink through the print heads to keep them clean and unclogged. Over a 3 month period when I wasn't using the printer much it managed to empty 2 of the ink cartridges, so it cost over £40 when not even being used! As you can imagine I've stopped using it for the moment.

I might upgrade to a different A3 printer; maybe a Canon. Or look into continuous ink systems for the HP.