This is why your printer never works.
brandonsmind.com
brandonsmind.com
Laser printers, shockingly, work every time and run out of toner about once every two years for the average home user. I went through four or five color inkjets before finally learning...my color laser has been working fine for three years now, and has only needed the black toner cartridge replaced once (color toner cartridges are still at about 30% full and have probably another year of service in them). Sure, it cost $800 (it's a networked model, and they've come down since then), but I had already spent more than that on inkjets and ink cartridges over the years. I expect I'll get another several years out of it, and I never have to wonder if my printer will crap out when I really need it to work (which happened numerous times with inkjets).
Not that I'm bitter.
I suppose I could use an inkjet to print color photos. But is there ever any actual reason to print a color photo at home, besides just being so old that you can't accept Flickr? I suppose if I were a print magazine designer who liked to show off proofs... but then I'd probably get serious and buy a color laser.
A year or two later, I bought my mom a pretty high end standalone inkjet photo printer, the kind that requires no computer to operate--just hook up the camera and press the print button. I bought it because she never used the digital camera I'd given her the year before (without the printed photos it just wasn't a camera, as far as she was concerned). I don't think that photo printer works any more (last time I saw her taking photos she was back to the film camera). I suspect she used it a half dozen times, whenever my 4 year old nephew was around to work it for her. Obviously, that did nothing to instill me with new confidence in modern inkjet technology.
Soon my army of printer-stepper robots will swarm over all the earth and world domination will be mine. Narf, Poit, etc...
That said, there are certainly decent, affordable inkjet printers out there that do what they do well, namely printing photos and graphics. Most people just go for whatever printer is cheapest, but if you do just a little bit of research, you'll find models that have separate cartridges for each ink colour and permanent printing heads. This means that (a) you only replace ink that's actually used up, (b) the print head is built to last, (c) the cartridges are simple and therefore cheap. Our HP PhotoSmart 8250 is great, never jams up and a pack of 6 cartridges with a stack of photo paper costs less than €30. My parents' cheapo inkjets keep playing up and replacing the cartridges costs twice as much because the print head is on the cartridge. Plus, the print quality isn't as good. After about 3 refills, the price works out about the same.
So basically, it's just the old fallacy that cheapest = best value.
They were all crap, and stopped working by the time of the second or third cartridge change--total and unrepairable ink clogging issues on the Epsons, while the HPs had a bad habit of banding. Even though the HPs continued to print, by some definition of print, they were useless for use by my business. I gave one away to someone who didn't care, and left the other one by the road (someone carried it off by the next day, so I guess I gave that one away too).
I've learned my lesson. I'm always surprised when I come across folks who've ever had a good experience with an inkjet, as they are 100% garbage in my experience. For the first six months or so, they print beautifully, and then it's all downhill from there.
Color laser for $300 flat. It does what it is supposed to do.
Anyway, plastic kills the planet.