[in_the_sticks]

Why? Color laser printers are getting fairly cheap (mine's a basic printer, granted, but it was quite a bit cheaper than the cheapest EcoTank models). You don't have to worry about your ink drying out or print heads getting clogged.

[onion2k]

That's great if you print a couple of hundred pages a year, but if you print a couple of hundred pages a day a cheap color laser printer will be very expensive to run and it'll break down often enough to be a significant problem.

No doubt your printer serves you well, but that doesn't mean it's a good solution for everyone.

[ZanyProgrammer]

If you're printing a couple of hundred pages a day, I'd assume its for work and that's part of the cost of doing business. In my personal life I print out like a dozen pages a year? Mostly boarding passes.

[Declanomous]

The nice thing about inkjets is that they are smaller. I have a Brother HL 5250dn (off the top of my head). I bought it for $75 eight years ago, and I've printed about 30,000 pages through it. Most of those pages were while I was in college and was doing research. Now I print about 100 pages a year, and I mildly resent the printer for all the space it takes up.

On the flip side, my company has a set of 3 hp printers that we use twice a year for printing stuff at the last minute for our two conferences, which are less than a month apart. We have to buy new print cartridges every year, cause the ink dries in the container. I think our cost per page is probably close to a dollar. This year we had to throw out a number of unused cartridges because they dried out in the package, despite being less than 18 months old.

Moral of the story is that inkjets suck no matter what, and the biggest downside of laser printers is their size.

[specialist]

Huh.

There was a time when cost per (large format) page (high to low) was inkjet, laser, electrostatic.

In fact, with our print volumes, switching from inkjet to the $100k electrostatic would pay for itself in 3 months. Inkjet prints cost $1.40 per vs 0.10 for electrostatic. Laser was somewhere in the middle.

[cptskippy]

So what's your proposed solution? Surely you're not suggesting an inkjet.

[dboreham]

I just took delivery of my first color laser printer and while I agree with the benefits, I was a little surprised at how large it is (mine is an HP M553dn). This of course makes sense: it needs space for four toner cartridges. I can however imagine many people having insufficient counter space to host a color laser printer.

[bpoyner]

This. I purchased a multifunction HP color Laserjet (M477fdn) from Costco for $340. The only thing it can't do is glossy photographs.