Is inkjet printing really that expensive?

I was at BestBuy tonight, and I thought - gosh! Wouldn’t it be neat to have a multifunction printer like the HP Officejet 6210 so that I can Print, Fax, Scan and Copy at home?

Then I could have the freedom to print photos whenever I wanted!

So then I took at look at the consumables. Let’s assuming that I get the HP Paper and the HP Photo Ink that are recommended.

The HP Paper is ~$24 for 60 sheets. That’s 40 cents a sheet. Uh oh. Already we’re above the Ofoto/Smugmug price.

The HP Photo Ink cartridge is ~$22 for 450 pages assuming 15% coverage according to the specs. Well if you’re printing a photo, wouldn’t it be 100% coverage? At the same time, you would be printing on 4×6 paper instead of 8.5×11 paper which is what I’m assuming the 15% is based off of. So by my math, 100% coverage of 4×6 would give you ~263 pages. So that’s about 8.3 cents a photo in ink. (Or it is ~67 pages if the 15% refers to 4×6 paper - which would then be 32 cents a photo).

So let’s see… in the end the cost of printing a photo in consumables alone would be 48 cents (or 71 cents). This doesn’t even include the cost of the printer! Youch!

Is inkjet printing really that expensive? Or did I make a mistake here?