I’ll never go back to inkjet. Laser doesn’t cost that much more. The toner doesn’t dry out or clog. I think it’s much better for someone who doesn’t print that often. It’s cheaper and much less frustrating in the long run.
For the long run, a laser printer is more economical.
That water color ink is way over priced.
Your observation is basically accurate, but it depends a great deal on the laser printer that you have chosen. I pined for a color laser when they first came out. Then we got them at work. From my experience there... some of them can be much more trouble and far more expensive to operate than an inkjet.
We went through a lot of toner cartridges at $110 a piece and some of them had problems almost immediately. They may not dry out but they cake up and clog and one of the things you could do to sometimes get them working again was to take them out and shake them. But if you didn't do it right messy toner would sometimes get all over the place. It got worse when the department started buying remanufactured toner cartridges, but the OEM cartridges were not that much better. And these were large commercial printers that cost a lot to start with. We had technicians coming into service them fairly frequently. To be fair they did get a lot of use and abuse at some stations.
Up until our last ink jet all-in-one quit working after several years we churned out a lot of material for very little expense and not a lot of trouble. But I did switch from a cheap continuous ink flow system to plain Jane refillable cartridges when we stopped going through as much ink.
Most inexpensive printers whether laser or inkjets are designed by the manufacturers to sell cartridges, and then they are designed to quit after a certain amount of printing has been done using the waste ink counter. The business model of most of the manufacturers is a bit seedy and causes a lot of frustration, even though the initial cost of the printer is often less than what it actually cost to make them and get them through the supply chain to the consumer.
I think that the new inkjets with ink tanks instead of cartridges are a more honest business model, but even they have the waste ink counter. When you install a continuous ink flow system on a printer, you typically reroute the waste ink flow tube to an external container. It is incredible to see the amount of ink that is wasted in the automatic head cleaning process... This type of waste does not happen as much with laser printers, so that is a plus.