Indeed, inkjet printers are so inexpensive in part because manufacturers are forgoing profits on hardware to recoup their investment through premium-priced refill cartridges. If you're performing very color-intensive tasks, such as 8x10 photographs, you might burn through a set of cartridges in only a few dozen pages. But I find there are actually few home printing chores where color is essential, and most of the time I'd rather avoid draining those expensive ink tanks. I spend much of my work day in a home office and print frequently, perhaps 50 pages a week. If I didn't remember to turn off the color on the inkjet, the costs would be even higher because I print a lot of Web pages that are festooned with color banner ads.
Lasers are also faster, in general, than inkjets.
The Samsung ML-4500 is rated at eight pages per minutes, while the HP 932C runs at 4.5 pages per minute. Inkjets first gained popularity in the mid-1990s because they were much cheaper than laser printers. Early models were hobbled by very high ink consumption, tortoise-like print speed and low image quality, but the improvements in recent years have been nothing less than phenomenal. Until the last year or so, most laser manufacturers appeared ready to concede the low end of the market to inkjets. Brother, Lexmark, Minolta-QMS, NEC and Xerox.