I really do like a good color laser printer, BUT, I'm not convinced these are practical yet for most home users.
This is a very good point! Because color lasers must deal with 4 colors (KCMY) they have roughly 4x the complexity as a B/W laser. The very cheapest color lasers are almost as bad reliability-wise as the sub-$100 color inkjets. Inkjet printers do have the inherent advantage of being simpler. There are robust inkjet printers out there that are designed for the higher duty-cycles of the office. HP's Business Inkjet series is a good example. The latest offering is the BIJ300. For ~$800 you get 80cc separate ink tanks, robust print speed performance, full networking and language support. I believe cost per page is around 3 cents for monochrome text and 6-7 cents for color. And it's a BIG machine, fully comparable to a color laser - Definitely not the cheesy inkjets you get at Costco.
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I really do like a good color laser printer, BUT, I'm not convinced these are practical yet for most home users. This is a very good point! Because color lasers must deal with 4 colors (KCMY) they have roughly 4x the complexity as a B/W laser. The very cheapest color lasers are almost as bad reliability-wise as the sub-$100 color inkjets. Inkjet printers do have the inherent advantage of being simpler. There are robust inkjet printers out there that are designed for the higher duty-cycles of the office. HP's Business Inkjet series is a good example. The latest offering is the BIJ300. For ~$800 you get 80cc separate ink tanks, robust print speed performance, full networking and language support. I believe cost per page is around 3 cents for monochrome text and 6-7 cents for color. And it's a BIG machine, fully comparable to a color laser - Definitely not the cheesy inkjets you get at Costco.