That’s true. I don’t print much (I’m happy to go to the print shop) but my wife does quite a bit, but not enough to keep the ink from drying out.

After buying two inkjet printers and having constant problems with the cartridges it probably would’ve been cheaper to start with the Brother laser printer I eventually bought. I didn’t realize that HP would lock out cartridges from their subscription on cancellation either (which feels very morally wrong to me).

It's technically more money upfront, but you're not just buying the printer itself: you're also buying the starter ink/toner cartridges that come with the device. The starter toner gives you vastly more pages than the starter ink, and it basically never goes bad. According to Brother, the size of a starter toner cartridge is 1000 A4 pages. According to HP, their Deskjet and Envy starter cartridges print about 150 and 250 pages, respectively.

So that higher upfront cost doesn't just go into a better, more efficient machine; it also goes into quadruple the starting pages or more. There are people who could seriously never print more than 1000 pages, whereas the starter for a Deskjet is so small that you practically ought to buy a spare cartridge alongside the printer for when it near-immediately runs out.

Basically, if I'm not flat-ass broke, I'm paying another $63 upfront for an XL ink cartridge from HP for one of these printers. And what's the page yield? 430. I'm still not even near the starter toner cartridge page capacity after spending an extra $63 on ink. To me, the upfront cost of an inkjet printer is pragmatically higher unless I'm so boots-theory-of-economics broke that all I can afford is the printer unit and only print a few pages a month tops.

Only for colour laser because they're much more complicated internally. My B&W isn't any bigger than an inkjet scanner/copier/printer combo unit.

Exception: Definitely heavier.