I’m in the laser fan club too. I got a Brother color laser with scanner a couple of years ago and I love it. Haven’t even had to replace the starter toner yet (have 60% of color and 30% of black left).
I print infrequently and inkjets do not work well for that. I pretty much had to buy a new set of inkjet cartridges every time I wanted to print something, which made the cost per page ridiculous, and the time per page could be days (since I couldn’t actually print it until after I could schedule a trip to the store or get cartridges delivered and replaced). The laser does not have that problem.
The laser is not, however, a great printer for images and vector graphics. You can clearly see a dithering pattern, the colors are a bit weak (not as sharp and vibrant as ink), and on a few occasions it has misunderstood the image and printed weird noise. Despite that, it has worked well enough for us. (As an example, we printed a ton of missing pet flyers with photos on them and only a few came out messed up.) And it does fine with things like forms that have lines and solid boxes. If I wanted to print frameworthy photos or art, I’d go to a store and print it there.
Life is too short to spend it dealing with infernal torture devices of plastic and silicon. Let the professional masochists at kinkos maintain those things.
For the last three years I’ve had to manage a herd of 200-odd Xerox ColorQube 8700S printers. They do everything great. As long as they remain good and hot. And perfectly motionless. Otherwise their melted crayon ink gets all over the insides and blocks up its sensors and the thing pukes all over itself.
And apparently you have to clean those sensors by hand and there’s no reliable software reset.
Solid ink printers. Beautifully elegant concept on paper. But about as foul in practice as caseless ammunition and communism.
The wirecutter has some great reommendations (they’re owned by Consumer Reports and get all their revenue through referrals):
I agree with their recommendation that HP’s ink service is pretty reasonable - i spend a few dollars/month and no longer worry about ink - they send me more when I need it, and that’s way cheaper than buying a full set of cartridges every year or whatever.
If on the other hand you want laser, they have you covered there, too:
I used the snot out of Brothers on my last gig. They are not quite as sturdy and forgiving as HPs were in their heyday, but neither are today’s HPs, and Brothers are a very good value.
Topics are cheap!