This is what I tell my customers...
If you have kids in school, go with an inkjet, those work fine for school work. They are designed to print a few pages a week. If not, do not buy an inkjet. They purposely waste ink, dry up, time out, use falsely filled cartridges. Unless you fit into the several pages a week category, these machines are designed to drain your wallet and nothing more. Put it this way, per ounce, HP and Lexmark ink, costs more than Dom Pérignon champagne, for INK! Why do you think they can sell a whole printer for the price of the cartridge.
Bigger offices, I tell them to lease a machine. $100 a month, 1penny for B&W, 7cents for color. They never pay for ink, or maintenance.
For homes and small offices...
I know, you want color, but hear me out.
My advice is go buy a Brother (NOT HP!) black and white laser Fax/Printer/scanner.
The ink is cheap, doesn't dry up and being a fax machine, it's meant for a higher duty cycle. So what about color...
I service several offices, some have rented huge printers like the old Xerox machines, others use smaller color lasers. Anything smaller than a massive box, isn't going to be cheap. I have some offices with $800 and $1800 color lasers and it costs them 80cents per color page and 50 cents per B&W. THAT'S INSANE! Yes, you can get a color laser that prints for under 20 cents (even 10), but they are few and far between, and I can guarantee you, Office Max, Staples and Office Depot DO NOT carry them, I've looked. No one wants to sell a laser printer that produces cheap color prints because they want to sell you the ink. Because of this, not many are made. In fact I have a perfectly good, low use, $800 color laser in my basement, it was GIVEN to me by a customer who was dumping it, because it was too expensive to refil, he went and bought a used $1800 one. I put it on Craigslist, and couldn't even get $100 for it unless I put $300 worth of ink in it. If you want cheap color prints, you almost need to buy or lease an expensive printer.
So I tell home and small office customers to use the B&W laser fax, and take your color prints to Kinko's, Walmart, etc.. Even if you ignore the gas and the paper costs, it's still cheaper to have them print it for you in the long run due to the ink waste, cost of initial buy in, etc... It sounds crazy, but it's how color printing is at the moment.
Side note:
Okay, so you've seen all the no HP comments...
When I get a call to an office about a printer, and almost every time for a scanner, I can guess right away, it's an HP. I can also correctly assume their computer is running like junk as well. I CRINGE when someone calls about them because I know it will be a long night. This goes triple if it's an older printer/scanner and they have Windows 7 or 8. The drivers and software looks nice, but it doesn't work well, and just drags down the system to a crawl.
They love to load you up with links to buy ink ($$$$$), get help, and links to buy more HP products as well ($$$$). Unfortunately, they aren't just links, the link to buy ink, is actually a decent size program. Ever see a 395meg pdf printer manual? I have... More than once. HP is also HORRENDOUS when it comes to driver updates. Upgrade one time and your printer will probably no longer work. Doesn't matter if it's an $1800 printer. I have 3 in offices right now that while they love the printer, it doesn't like Win7. The printer came out just before Win7, but they never supported it. These are offices where your infrastructure is designed to last a while and cover a range of systems... No so from HP.
Basically, everything about HP printers is about you spending money, from the time of purchase to the moment you replace it with another. Lexmark isn't much different, they took their cues from HP.
If you don't buy a Brother, look at Canon and Epson. While Epson and Canon are sometimes rebranded HP, they are cheaper to refill and seem to be the better models, and funnily enough, are usually cheaper than the HP's. As others have said though, Brother is the one to aim for. They know what they are doing, they've been around a long time, and they aren't looking to bilk you for every penny they can. HP gets a lot of repeat customers because people know HP, assume it's good and also assume their experience is normal. Brother customers rarely buy Brother again, because they don't have to. I come in, set them up, and I never mess with them again.
