I came across this article today in the SF Gate — How to watch out for printer makers' ploys. It does a pretty good job at explaining why I opted early this year to buy a lower end laser printer rather than a commonly purchased inkjet printer.
...This all becomes obvious when you compare text output from laser and inkjet printers. Lots of inkjets now deliver "near-laser quality," but few, if any, actually get there. ...That's what you get, I'm afraid, when you print by squirting droplets of hot liquid ink at the page — no matter how many such droplets per inch the printer can squirt. ... the test reports accompanying a feature posted this month on "Top 10 Inkjet Printers" shows an average per-page cost of 4.5 cents for monochrome printing. (For color printing, the average was 12.7 cents per page.)The average costs for laser printing is about 1 to 2 cents per page. I like the model I bought because it will do “2-up” printing and it will print double sided (aka duplex). So now when I come across a nice news article on the web, instead of just sitting at the computer, I just print it 2-up, double sided — that's four “pages” per sheet. Most every news article you come across takes just one or two sheets of paper that way. The speed, the clarity, the cost-effectiveness, and more time away from the tube — it all added up in my book. If you have the means to invest in the up front cost of a low end laser printer (they start around $200), the down the road savings in inkjet cartridges will soon pay back dividends.