Originally Posted by Diseasel300

You fell for the sales-pitch hook, line, and sinker. Most of the "home" style laser printers you get nowadays are $100-150 when not on sale. When on sale (or Black Friday sale) you can get them under $100 easily.

Now let's talk about Toner/Ink. The average inkjet cartridge will do 200-250 pages before it runs out or dries up. Far less if the printer is used infrequently. The average laser cartridge will do 1500-2500 pages, never dries out, and doesn't age. The "starter" cartridge most lasers come with is good for 750-1000 pages, the inkjet around 100 pages.

Consider the average inkjet cartridge is $20-30 and the average laser cartridge is $75-100 (we're talking genuine OEM supplies here). Assuming you get rated pages out of your inkjet cartridges, you'll be at or beyond the cost of the bottom-end laser cartridge in cash outlay. Generics are even worse! The average generic laser cartridge is roughly twice the cost of a generic Inkjet cartridge, but does ~10 times the number of pages!

Then of course you come down to life expectancy of the printer itself. If you get 5 years out of an inkjet you did really well. The heads clog, the cleaning stations dry out or jam, the paper feeds wear out, and then they have a bad habit of just going "flaky" for no apparent reason. In a home setting, you should be able to get 10-20 years easily out of a laser printer. If you get one that recognizes PCL or PS as the printer language, you will never be obsolete either, PCL and PS printers can print from ANY computer with ANY operating system that speaks a dialect they understand. Standards are a wonderful thing.

When you factor in the waste, initial cost, and streaking/drying out issues that inkjets have, they're pointless in this day and age. People look ONLY at the cartridge cost or listen to the idiot at OfficeMax who doesn't even own a printer, but gets paid commission on whatever he sells.