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Thermodyne said:
There is no easy solution. Inkjets use ink and ink cartridges cost too much. My solution is two printers. Keep the inkjet and buy a Laser printer. Use the laser for everything that does not have to be in color, save the ink for stuff that must be in color. Most things don’t need to be in color, and even photos can be proofed in grey scale. You can pick a personal laser printer up cheap these days, Dell almost gives them away. If you have a home network, spring for a network interface, then mount the printer on the network. That way everyone has use of it without worrying about shares and print hosts being left running.
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This is exactly what Richard and I do. We have two hp printers, one is a color inkjet and the other is a b&w laserjet. I try to use the inkjet basically for printing color things, mostly birthday cards, christmas cards, photos, professional paperwork with color logos, etc. We use the b&w for everything else.
The inkjet is an ink hog of course and I normally have to put in two combo packs of ink (combo pack has one black cartridge and one color cartridge) in a year. Each pack cost $35 at officemax, so that's $70 a year on ink for that printer. However the printer cost us less than 40 bucks as we got in on sale during the holidays a couple of years ago (day after Thanksgiving sale). For that price I get somewhere between 500-1000 copies depending on the amount of color the copies have. I think it's definitely worth having around for that price as the price I would pay for cards, professional reprinting of pictures and business paperwork would definitely be more than $70 a year. For a while we didn't even stick with one inkjet for color, we got what we called 'disposable printers'. There were so many sales on cheap inkjets around here that when we needed a new one we just put the old one in a garage sale or something and bought new because ink cartridges were more expensive than buying another color inkjet. But I have really liked this little hp, so I have kept it for a while now.
The laserjet prints thousands and thousands of copies and I only have to replace the cartridge about once every 12-18 months. I can buy refurbished cartridges now at officemax for about $55. We paid $200 for this printer at CompUSA right after the new low priced lasers came out a few years ago and we've had no problem with it in all that time. It's definitely been the best printer investment we have ever made.