There is no good reason to ever buy an inkjet printer

  > His whole argument is that he's sure
  > you really don't want to print in color

Anyway his argument still holds. Color laser printers are still very affordable. I got a Dell e525w, which is not only a color printer but also a scanner, copier, and fax. It was $250.

And anyway, surely his argument is only reinforced if you want to print in color. If printing in black and white is more expensive with inkjet, then printing in color is even more expensive. The article cites a laser that's 1.7 cents a page and an inkjet that is 7 cents --- a difference of 5.3 cents per page. Now add the corresponding HP color cartridge, which is $31.54 for 165 pages, or 19 cents per page. For a laser you have to buy three more cartridges (cyan, magenta, and yellow) but they are usually the same price as black. So a total of 1.7 x 4, or 6.8 cents per page, for all four laser cartridges, versus 19 + 7, or 26, cents per page for inkjet.

Okay, so you would have to print about 500 pages to make up the difference between a $100 inkjet and a $200 laser. But after that it just gets cheaper and cheaper to own the laser. Plus lower maintenance. And the quality of the photos from my Dell is at least as good as any inkjet I owned, even a special Epson photo printer.

I address the photo-printing use case in the piece. There are tons of services (online and local) that will print your photos for you on very good paper for a low cost. I'm very skeptical that any inkjet can consistently produce photo prints at the same level of quality as you'd get from using those services at a competitive cost, because they're buying their consumables in bulk at wholesale prices where you're buying them in small batches after retail markups.

Maybe you're only printing a few photos, and the convenience of having a machine on your desk outweighs the higher cost. But the fewer photos you're printing, the less paying a premium to have hardware dedicated just to that task makes sense.

I'm open to being convinced that I'm wrong here, though. If you have figures that can show a plausible scenario where printing photos at home on an inkjet beats getting prints made by a third-party service, post them here and I'd be happy to review them.

It's like if I owned a car that, every time I wanted to refill the gas tank, I had to also replace the gas tank assembly, for $1,000. Then the cost of me getting "gas" is $1,020, while you pay just $20.