[mrec]

Thanks, I'll be in the market soon and this is exactly the sort of info I was looking for. Since you mention "the few times we need to print", is it safe to assume that their kit is fine with very very infrequent use? Inkjets really didn't like this, and I don't know much about lasers.

[nwallin]

Inkjets use liquid ink, and if the ink dries on the spray nozzle, it's dead. This process takes about a month. If you're lucky, the nozzle is part of the cartridge and you need to spend $100 (or more) on new cartridges. Otherwise you need to buy a new printer. Some printers have a mode where they'll spray a little bit though the nozzle if you haven't used the printer in ~2 weeks, but they need to be plugged in.

Laser printers use dry ink that never... gets more dry. I pulled my Brother out of storage after 2+ years and it worked great.

Toner is also considerably cheaper than inkjet ink, and lasts significantly longer. I haven't bought new toner in 8 years.

Personally, I use a black and white laser printer, and if I really, really need to print in color I'll do it at work. (happens basically never) I recognize not everybody has this luxury, and some people have far more need to print in color than I do.

If you need color printing volume is high enough to keep the nozzles in good shape, you're probably better off with a color laser printer because the ink is so much cheaper. If you don't print in color that much, it's a terrible, terrible idea to buy an inkjet printer.

Don't buy inkjet printers.

[magduf]

Sorry, but a bit of a pedantic note here: laser printers do not use dry ink. They don't use ink at all; they use "toner". Toner is really nothing more than microscopic particles of colored plastic. The printer uses electrostatic attraction to put the particles on a sheet of paper in a pattern, and then a "fuser" (a small heater) to melt the plastic so that it binds to the paper, without catching the paper on fire. So toner never goes bad because it's really nothing more than dust.

As for your B&W laser, it used to be that color lasers were horribly expensive so only companies had them. These days, color lasers have gotten pretty cheap, and aren't that much more than the B&W lasers. My Brother was about $200 IIRC. Of course, you can get a small B&W for under $100 now, but still, $200-300 is not budget-breaker for anyone in the IT industry. So even if you don't really need color that much, if you're in the market for a printer, I'd advise just spending the extra money and getting the color model, unless you really want your printer to be small (the color models are usually a lot larger, because of the separate toner cartridges).

I would never advise using an inkjet unless you really need to. They're a terrible deal financially; the only thing they're better at is costing less initially, but the consumables are very expensive and don't last long. They do make sense for some high-end high-volume applications, but those use more industrial-sized printers with continuous-flow ink, not small consumer printers with overpriced ink carts. Honestly, consumer inkjets are probably the biggest scam in all of computing history.