Funny, I came to the comments to dispute the printer point. I have a <$100 wireless duplex laser printer (Brother HL-2270DW) which works really well. It's not color, but does everything I need it to do. Maybe $100 doesn't qualify as cheap.
Some advice I received years ago was to forgo a color printer altogether and use Kinko's/UPS Store to do color. The cost savings are very good if you dont require a lot of color printing.
I think it was $120. Still on the original colors (replaced the black). Toner gives me a lot more prints, never goes bad because of disuse, and looks better. I love it.
Now I just wish I could find a no-drivers AirPrint compatible Color Laser with the same reliability and price point that was as small or smaller (so it still fit in my IKEA printer stand with rolling door). Haven't turned up such a device yet so I'll stick with this USB printer for awhile yet I guess.
It was discontinued years ago, but toner refills are still readily available, for about the same price as a new set of Inkjet cartridges (except again, more capacity, and if you only use it once every 6 months it won't complain and make you buy a new set).
Anyways, IMO Color Laser is definitely the way to go for the home user. The printers are pretty reasonably priced these days, and the TCO is drastically lower than any Inkjet printer I've ever owned.
My hypothesis is that inkjet is just an error-prone technology.
I think that on some instinctual level, I have always known that the home consumer market for color inkjet printers is absolutely saturated with crap. It all just seemed like a massive conspiracy to sell ink at prices higher than an equivalent quantity of heroin. I know a photo-artist who uses a higher-end inkjet to make archival-quality prints, and he buys 6 colors of UV-stable pigment inks, by the bottle, for less than most people pay for one dinky, chipped, proprietary replacement cartridge for their printer. Those consumer-level printers are engineered to be the absolute minimum-cost solution to get people to empty their ink cartridges.
So I'm not entirely certain that the two breeds of printer are comparable. Mono lasers are almost certainly considered by the industry to be small-office/home-office (SOHO) goods, wherein a perceived deficiency in quality or operating costs might hurt future large-office purchases.
Same here. Rescued an HP Laserjet 2100 from the trash, it lasted 10 years and would have kept going with more toner but I got a Brother something-or-another for $69 at OfficeMax.