Monochrome lasers aren't a big problem if you shop properly. You can do fine with a 1990s era laserjet. The bigger headache is color inkjets, and the ink they consume.
Plus, you'll probably meet cool people.
You had to enable higher quality prints, and use the special photo paper, of which they provided samples with the printer.
Oh and you had to wait about 5 minutes for a full page print, maybe 10. But people would say "this came from your HOME printer?" And there's all these little HP logos on the back of the photo, like a real print shop.
I was so impressed by the quality that I printed my first resume on photo paper, and was slightly confused when people were less than blown away by the appearance :-)