Your experience is very similar to what many of us have gone through with the Canon printers. I was previously an ardent fan of Canon printers. Though they all seemed to have a different lifespan, they were excellent printers. And it was possible to purchase off brand ink and still obtain fantastic print results. But eventually they would all suddenly display that dreaded Error B203 message. That is when you knew you were going to have to purchase another printer. Like some folks, I spent hours researching possible fixes. I spent even more time actually tearing the machine apart and trying some of the fix methods highlighted in various posts on this forum. Every now and then, I got one to work. But only for a very short time. Sort of like printer CPR. They all ended up with the error message. Ironically, that always seemed to occur right when I needed to complete a printing project. Very inconvenient. Deciding what to buy instead really took hours and hours of research followed by a lot of soul searching. Take HP for example. They make a great printer at a very reasonable price. The only problem is their OEM ink cartridges are extremely expensive. For example, one of their current all-in-one printers is the 8035 model. It has four cartridges. To replace them with the smalol, standard level cartridges (Amazon Prime) is just under $70. Obviously more for the higher capacity cartridges. It pains me to spend that much on ink for a homeowner model printer. The only solution for me was to upgrade to a more commercial printer which had additional options. I purchased a Brother Business Smart Pro Series model. Yeah, it's big. Yeah, the ink is expensive as well. But the capactiy is large and I anticipate thousands of copies per cartridge. The machine has incredibly large paper storage. The footprint of the machine is not going to be acceptable to many users. But I just got tired of purchasing a new Canon every other year or so. I think with Canon it's a crap shoot. They have serious quality control issues. You might get one to last 3-4 years. Or you might get one to struggle making it to the one year mark. When the printer is so poor that they have to have a forum to discuss the Error Messages, then you really need to punt and move to another manufacturer. I did and I have never looked back. So far, my small office Brother printer is doing a fantastic job. And I have printed a mountain of paper.
