I have a Brother entry level laser printer, first printer in years that I've liked. Will never buy an inkjet again, there is something inherently flawed with that technology.
I was about to say the same thing... It is really completely amazing how wide the gap is between standard, cheap ink jet and cheap Brother laser. Seriously do yourself a favour and just switch. Your sanity will thank you.
It's that Japanese engineering shit... my Brother label makers were a gift from a hackathon and one of them was a used on that had like 30,000 pages run through it. Powered it up, paired it through bluetooth, ran a perfect page through it.
There's nothing inherently flawed with inkjet printers. There are very good ones out there; look up something like the Canon imagePROGRAF PRO-1000. You're using an overly broad brush to unfairly tar the entire technology based on your experience with the very worst cash-grab implementations of it. It'd be like saying smartphones as a technology suck because a $50 piece of junk Chinese Android performs terribly.
No, inkjets are an inherently flawed technology. The nozzles dry out and clog up. If you use them infrequently, you'll use more ink for cleaning than you do for printing.
They're not "inherently flawed". Color laser doesn't come close to the same high quality photo prints. If printing high quality prints is something you regularly do then inkjet is your only option.
It's not that the technology is inherently flawed, it's that way too many people are buying them for document printing when they should instead be getting laser printers. Inkjets are much more of a niche specialty product.
Inkjet isn't really a home office printer tech. It's a "super high quality photo" tech. If you got a cheap inkjet for black and white document printing then you bought the wrong thing, plain and simple. Cheap inkjets aren't suitable for any purpose; they should just flat out be avoided, like all those really cheap no-brand Chinese electronics on Amazon/Wish.
There have been so many horror stories about inkjet printers that I went directly from dot matrix printers to lasers in the mid-1990's. I have never been disappointed.
The last printer I purchased was a Brother. Some people criticize them for the quality, but they seem to be fine for home and small office use. They don't play games with toner and are reasonably compatible with whatever you throw them on to.
Yet you do have to be careful when choosing lasers. Some vendors seem to use the same approach as inkjet printers when it comes to supplies, and it affects both consumer and corporate models. I also recall doing a fair bit of research on Brother printers to ensure I ended up with a good (but inexpensive) model. That being said, at least there are options.
I found we just went through ink like nobodies business. We don't print all the time (typically 3-4 times a year), and it would be sufficient gap that between prints we'd find the ink cartridges had dried up or just stopped working. No amount of cleaning runs would get it to flow smoothly again. It was getting stupid expensive to keep buying ink.
I bought a multi-function HP Laser printer a couple of years ago and haven't looked back (although we started having to print more and more frequently as our kids have got older). It's one of those devices that "just works" now. Even Linux automatically detects it on the network and configures itself for printing.
I have an Epson P900. Inkjet. 17x22” archival pigment prints at 1440 dpi. Paper feed isn’t the best ever but it’s usually not a problem. Inkjet is sublime and amazing.
I have a Canon Pixma Pro-100. Not quite as fancy but it does an amazing job. I've been using cheap matte photo paper for the few color documents I need and that works pretty well. It uses far less ink than I expected. It's cheaper to run than the terrible Epson photo printer it replaced.
I have used Brother MFC laser printers for over 10 years and I don’t hesitate to recommend them. Cheap enough to throwaway if they break, but otherwise the software stays out of your way.
The built in brother webconnect capability is nice to scan an OCR’d pdf directly to your dropbox/drive/box/one drive account. Too bad it doesn’t work with iCloud.
To add my voice to this, sure it’s nowhere near the quality of the super fancy laser printer at work, but for home use the brother laser printer I got (entry level) has been absolutely fantastic. At this point literally the only printer I’m not scared to recommend to friends when they ask.
High-end ink is fine, just expensive. Both for the printer, AND for the inks.
You cannot reproduce photo-quality prints with just 4 colors (cmyk). Your high-end photo-level printers use 10 or 12 inks, with far higher resolution than a typical $200 Brother printer.
But if you're only doing office work / text / etc. etc., laser is great. Even mild graphics (diagrams mainly) work out fine with laser prints.
--------
The typical $200 ink printer however, is complete garbage.
