thermodynamics
Resident Enginerd
Buy a laser. The cheap ones are sooooo good now. Samsung & Brother make a decent entry-level model. They have a very low cost per page, with a modest up front cost. And the print quality is superb even on cheap paper. I also like the idea of getting one of the old HP lasers from years past. They were all outstanding machines.
As for color, I have a 10-year-old HP 990 with a duplexer. Most of the HPs from that era were pretty nice. They're fast and the cartridges don't cost an arm and a leg. As for photo printing, I still think that's better done at a big box store. You have to have a pretty fancy pigment-based setup with all sorts of color matching calibrations to be anywhere near the commercial setups.
As for color, I have a 10-year-old HP 990 with a duplexer. Most of the HPs from that era were pretty nice. They're fast and the cartridges don't cost an arm and a leg. As for photo printing, I still think that's better done at a big box store. You have to have a pretty fancy pigment-based setup with all sorts of color matching calibrations to be anywhere near the commercial setups.