I own a HP 9025 printer. The ink cartridges are beyond their expiry date and seem to have dried up. I don't use my printer enough to use up the ink before the expiry date. So I have been looking at refurbished ink cartridges on Walmart and eBay.

The best I can do is to buy a replacement set of ink cartridges for about 40% of the price of a new HP ink cartridge set. The refurbished ink cartridges all seem to be located just off the boat in southern California and the descriptions are written in Chinglish. But by the same token the prices the printer manufactures charge for their deliberately non-interchangeable ink cartridges are high enough that I can see decent quality ink cartridges selling for much less in a competitive market.

What do you think? Should I buy refurbished ink cartridges or take my printing/copying to the library at ten cents a page?

Think about buying a color laser printer with Linux support via a PPD file (no "filter drivers" required!).

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Be careful! HP printers know whether you are using genuine HP cartridges or not. If you use refills, they will work a few times and then stop working. And if you ask for help, you'll get told, "Well, what do you expect, using those crappy cartridges?"

Arnulf is right: ink cartridges are intended for frequent use. If you only use the printer occasionally like I do, laser printing is better value. Since it uses powder, not ink, it can't dry out.

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Yes, that can be a problem. What I started doing years ago is, if I haven't printed anything each week, I print a test page. I guess you could use hplip utility or the printer interface for your desktop environment or open a browser and in the location bar type, localhost:631 and take it from there. Using a little ink once a week is cheaper than replacing dried out cartridges.
I have no affiliation with the following company, but I've had very good luck with DoorStepInk at, https://doorstepink.com/
If you send them your used cartridges (and they pay the postage), they will give you a discount. You can also buy them through Amazon.

They were sued over that and lost in court. Whether they are still to get away with it or not, I don't know. Never had a problem with my HP Deskjet, but it, like myself, is an older model.

Yes, they originally had printers that refused altogether to work with refills and told the user as much. That was rightly struck down in court as a restraint of trade. But now they do something more subtle: the cartridges work a few times, then stop working, and no one can prove that it's deliberate. Obviously HP deny that it is.

When this happened to me, and the instructions on the HP help site didn't make any difference, I did a wider search and found that lots of people had had similar experiences. So I just decided not to use HP printers any more on principle.

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There was a time when HP was a reputable company, but they, like so many other companies are now being ran by thugs and scumbags in suits and ties. Apparently, ethics and morality are not taught in the business schools.
Too bad, there are always exceptions, but there was a time, decades ago, when a company gave their customers a good product at a fair price. Now they produce the cheapest possible garbage they can get away with and sell it at the highest possible price.
I keep waiting for the public to rebel, but they seem to be willing sheep.

But any new user to Linux who asks what printer to use gets told, "Use HP because their printers are fully supported." Which is true of course.

When you look at how cheap ink-jet printers are, how do you think it's done? They sell you a cheap printer and get the profit from the ink. It's like game consoles, where the profit comes off the games, not the hardware. Admittedly the HP9025 isn't obviously a cheap model, but when you look at all the features it's still very reasonable and not a model that's likely to sell heavily to home users.

After reading all of your advice it is a toss-up between buying a laser printer and using the library. I'll have to price laser printers and toner before I can decide.

I've generally had good luck using 3rd party ink in my HP printers (currently a DeskJet 3522).

I used to use ink-jet printers, but found out that ink cartridges were not reasonably priced. The printer is a commodity, the ink is the profit maker. A printer that is used often does not normally have a problem with drying out ink, but for someone who prints a dozen pages a month or less it becomes an issue.

I use a color HP laserjet and found that after-market toner cartridges are available as a full set at a cost of less than the price of one cartridge from HP. I also found that it is simple to set the printer to allow using non-HP cartridges. In 6 years with the one printer I have only replaced the original (starter) cartridges and one additional set of cartridges. (HP toner cost would have been over $340 for that one set of cartridges.)

The printer cost about $400, toner about $75, so total of $475 in 6 years, and the printer is still going strong. Compare the cost of toner ($75) to what it would have cost in ink cartridges over the same time due to the ink drying out. Easy to see which is economically a better choice for me.