My experience at home is with inkjets, just standard size - no large format units - but here's what I found.
My previous printer was a conventional Epson Workforce and I found they flat out LIED about the number of prints per expen$ive cartridge - I strongly believe they deliberately waste ink during the automatic cleaning cycles. (Same with my previous Canon printer.) At about the 5 year mark it stopped printing some colors and I tried flushing out the print heads - no joy, it just wasn't working, so I bought an Epson ET-3760 - it's an "Eco Tank" printer and so far I haven't had to refill ink at all, and I've had it nearly 2 years. From looking at the ink levels, it seems like black is about 1/2 full, and the colors are each still about 3/4 full. My overall impression is that my previous Workforce printer was better built, more highly featured, and less expensive - probably because Epson knew they'd be making a lot more money on ink. (There's GOT to be a HUGE markup on that!)
Every Saturday I run a test print with text in each color (black, cyan, magenta, yellow) and color bars - so far, so good, no clogs. My only comment about printing is that the solid red saturation looks low, but when I print an actual picture it looks good, especially if I use photo grade paper. Oh, and I don't think the "scan" function is as good as my previous Epson, and definitely lags my older Canon.