I bought a color laser printer for a few hundred bucks and despite almost never having to print anything it's one of the better purchases I've made.

It just works. It's not wasteful. And it won't dry out from lack of use. I figure I'll break even over buying ink-jet printers and cartridges in another year or so. Even if everything costs more in short term, it's so much less wasteful.

Same here. Purchased a workgroup color laser almost 7 years ago. My printing volume is fairly low (around 500 pages / year) and I'm still on the original set of cartridges. The amortized cost of this printer has been amazing-- under $75 / year. It uses the PCL protocol and has an Ethernet connection, so it's a long way off from practical obsolescence, too. I'll likely be using this printer in another 7 years.

I tried to do the same thing but bought a cheap <$100 mono laser. I pretty much never print, maybe a page a month, if that.

It's only a year old and now it won't suck up the paper properly. I have to literally stick my hands into it and feed the paper in page-by-page.

The thing has successfully printed less than 20 pages and it's already not working.

It's 2016 and Samsung can't make a rubber roller that works. And I don't want to buy another just to have the same thing happen.

I spent about $400 -- I figure a sub $100 laser printer is much the same thing as buying a cheap inkjet.

I wrongfully assumed that an appliance manufactured and sold to perform a single task would be able to perform that task.

That was a mistake.

I think this whole thread is about how that's a mistake! You get what you pay for and cheap printers are crap; they're so cheap they're virtually useless.

Don't new color laser printers use cartridges? They just have toner instead of ink.

Yeah they do. But they don't dry out which is one of the big reasons every time I had to print I needed a new cartridge.

I worked at a .edu for years and we had several of those old, early LaserJets that worked for years, spitting out hundreds of thousands -- even millions, in a few cases -- of printed pages, with nothing more than the occasional change of toner cartridge.

Those laserjets don't have print heads like an inkjet printer does.

I'm mostly in the same boat as you. However, I have found that with electronics, you run the risk of your beloved older piece of equipment not even being able to connect to your newer equipment because it doesn't have the latest connector (SCSI, Firewire, USB-2, USB-3, USB-C, Thunderbolt, Lightning, VGA, XGA, DVI, Mini-Display Port, HDMI, composite, component, etc.). On top of that, you have the issue of drivers and apps that can talk to the thing, too. Not as bad in the case of a printer, but still an issue for many devices.

USB 1,2 and three has been backwards compatible.

Ethernet is. Most WiFi gear is.

For most video equipment there exist some kind of adapters.