Actually the infamous HP printers (Officejet 86x and up) had/have pretty good per page costs (color <10€cts/page, b/w <5€cts) even with the "expensive" original

Actually the infamous HP printers (Officejet 86x and up) had/have pretty good per page costs (color <10€cts/page, b/w <5€cts) even with the "expensive" original cartridges AND they work superbly with GNU/Linux. Brother and Epson also have some models with an attractive per page cost, with the former even not hindering the use of 3rd party-cartridges/refilling. And sincerely, once you want (other question is if you need it) a color printer, most of the points of this guy are just plainly wrong if not FUD: - color prints with lasers are horribly expensive if you buy a <1000€ machine. Also refill-cartridges are the same thing as with inkjets. - if you buy a used +1000€-machine be prepared to replace the drum (~300€) and set aside a hefty pile of cash for toner cartridges – while they may last 10k-15k pages, 300€ per color cartridge is not so much fun... even for basic b/w he just talks a lot of BS - as mentioned above, you easily find a 200€-class inkjet with HP/Epson/Brother, where you pay 30-40€ for a cartridge worth ~2000 pages of b/w. You'll have a hard time finding a (new) b/w laser with reccurring costs as low as this at the price point (and you're limited to b/w) - at least the HP ink doesn't care for getting wet (just soaked a paper once, when a friend explained to me, why he still pays around 300€ for a set of toner worth 1000 pages...) - if you really print a lot, you most certainly want things in color. Or at least I did during school (which is probably the only place to privately print anymore), sorry Jason. And for absolutely lowest operating cost (w/o power) buy a parallel adapter card and hook up your dad's old needle printer (if you don't care for power it also will do remotely untamperable logging for you!)