No inkjet printers work well when they are infrequently used. Every inkjet printer will spray ink into absorbent padding inside the printer when it goes a few days without printing in order to stop dried ink from clogging the print heads. On high end inkjets the padding is user replaceable (printer manufacturers refer to it as a “maintenance box”), and on low end models it’s sealed inside the printer and you have to throw the whole printer out when it becomes saturated with ink. This is why people who print infrequently will only get a few pages out of a cartridge. There’s a baseline consumption of ink that happens whether or not you use the printer. The smarter move for people who print infrequently is doing what you do, having a B&W laser printer (which doesn’t suffer from this problem) and getting color prints done at Kinko’s or something when you need them.