Ask Lemmy

The advantage is that you can get a cheap laser printer.
They'll happily print every day for years and cost next to nothing to run.
They'll also happily print after you didn't use them for a long time.
Ink printers are generally less durable, cost much more to run and their heads dry out if you don't use them regularly.
Color laser printers are expensive, big, and the color isn't good enough for photos, only colored documents.

My brother color laser is decent, but the toner is expensive. So expensive that i buy knockoff toner. Which 95% of the time is solid. Until every once in a while a kid needs something printed that's a photo. Not sure why, but it is absolute garbage at photos. Like not even close. Streaks and bands of color everywhere. I'm not even trying fancy photo paper, just trying to get details. A caffeinated adhd toddler with fistful of crayons could do better.

But if you want to print a worksheet in color? Does fantastic.

Advantage being you only have to buy one toner cartridge and drum.

Toner is cheaper if you have a laser black only, lots of pages per refill.

At work I've installed 10 color inkjet epson L6460 printers 2-3 years ago and most of them I still haven't refilled.

They come with 2 bottles of black ink and one of everything else, last forever, will print after 4 months unused if you do a print head cleaning (a few times in a row) and the Epson brand bottles are 8 - 12 bucks each.

For home use a cheaper Ecotank would probably serve you just as well.

Cost is like 100 times less per page.

Black and white is more common in laser printers, less complex, cheaper and it takes up less room.

Laser printers don't just shoot color particles on the paper like ink jet / piezo printers.

They "magnetize" a photo conductor so the toner particles stick to it and then usually transfer it to the paper using pressure and then fix it using heat. You can't really do the first part for multiple colors at the same time so color lasers can get pretty complex to repeat this process for each color (CMKY, sometimes more).

So why not an ink printer instead?

• If you use them often they will cost you a lot. Printer manufacturers love ink printers because they can basically sell water (with a tiny bit of color) for the price of gold. That's also the reason why they put you much effort into detection of original ink cartridges.
• If you don't use them often, the print heads tend to clog and guess what the printers use to flush them? Copious amounts of liquid gold (ink).

Some laser printers can do color (the Brother HL-L series can't), they're just not great at hi-res color images.

Laser printers are faster, more reliable, and are generally cheaper to operate in the long run, espesially if you are only printing once in a blue moon. Inkjet printers like the Epson Pommes_fur_dein_Balg recommended are better at hi-res images and are often cheaper up front, but are more expensive in the long run.

They are not sub par, they are dye based, which fade when continuously exposed to UV. Pigment inks are used in photo oriented printers, like prosumer and pro photo printers. Dye tends to clog less, pigment need more constant use.

Laser color printers are better in every respect except for photos. Laser color printers usually have a 300-600 DPI native resolution, while 1440 is common in inkjet printers. Also, inkjet puts liquid on the page, which means that a good driver can actually blend inks to achieve a much greater color gamut, while lasers can only put one of the 4 basic CMYK colors in a point.

Different use cases.