I ran an LJ-III for a fair few years while I still have an inkjet for colour bits. Got it free when a local company was upgrading and going to bin it. Despite the heavy service it had done in the previous environment it still worked like a charm. It was eventually getting close to needing a new drum and so forth which might have been relatively expensive, but at the point I bought an inexpensive colour laser, gave the LJ-III away and took a lump hammer to the inkjet.
Consumer grade lasers these days aren't quite the same creature as the tanks of old, but I see little reason to own an inkjet. For basic colour a laser does perfectly well, for many photos they do pretty good (inkjets are better for photos but only if you feed them expensive paper - output from a laser is sharp even on cheap bog-standard paper which an inkjet is actually worse on, and unless you print lots or often need hen now it works out better to get things printer elsewhere). Inexpensive lasers can be a minefield (some of the cheap ones are cheap for a reason...) and are more expensive to run than those tanks of old, but get a reasonable one and you'll be happy with it for years and they are a lot cheaper than running a 'jet for any use case.
Nice! I like how you describe them as tanks of old. Very apt description. :)
I agree with you about the inkjets, I had one of these "photo" printers -- it may have even been from Kodak or something or Fuji. Great results, but since I printed 10 photos a year, same problem as the usual inkjets...and eventually I found the special ink and paper to be unlocateable.
Consumer grade lasers these days aren't quite the same creature as the tanks of old, but I see little reason to own an inkjet. For basic colour a laser does perfectly well, for many photos they do pretty good (inkjets are better for photos but only if you feed them expensive paper - output from a laser is sharp even on cheap bog-standard paper which an inkjet is actually worse on, and unless you print lots or often need hen now it works out better to get things printer elsewhere). Inexpensive lasers can be a minefield (some of the cheap ones are cheap for a reason...) and are more expensive to run than those tanks of old, but get a reasonable one and you'll be happy with it for years and they are a lot cheaper than running a 'jet for any use case.