I throw the cheap, 3rd party inks in my tiny, desktop printer. They often fail (say they're out of ink before they are) and have ruined print heads before. On a tiny printer, it's worth the gamble for me. Especially if you're not printing serious photography. At 1/3rd the price of the real deal, the savings is pretty significant. And those tiny printers are cheap. I got my current one for under a dollar (thrift store find). It's not even that old.
On my large format printers, I won't use anything but the real stuff. Those things are way too expensive and delicate to risk on cheap ink.
A Canon Pro 9000 is kind of on the boarder for me. If it were old enough that I could afford to lose it, then I'd be willing to try some cheap ink in it. I can't recommend a brand, because every time it seems like a brand works for me, I go to reorder and find that the new ones don't work like the last ones did. So I wind up constantly switching brands looking for one that is cheap enough and reliable enough to make it worth while.
By the way, if you think your ink is expensive, my Epson P9000's ink cartridges costs over $2,500 to replace all of the ink cartridges! That's 10 cartridges at a little over $250 a piece (for 700ml). Granted, they last forever.