It is rather easy to keep an inkjet printer from gunking up if you buy a set of refillable cartridges, fill them with a 50/50 mix of demineralized water and inkjet cleaning fluid, install them and run a cleaning cycle after you finished a printing session. No ink in the nozzle means no gunk. This trick also works well for cleaning nozzles, since the cleaning fluid is a surfactant and it breaks up clumps of dried pigment better than just a stream of ink.

If your only color print needs are for photos, look into dye sub printers. You can go years in between printing, and use the same roll with no issues. These are pretty much what you get when you order from any brick&mortar store printing from digital files or any modern photobooth kiosk

Yes dye subs do a great job and they don't gunk up. But unfortunately as you said they are only for photos, they require special paper, and they only print in smaller sizes (i.e. you cannot use one to print a color page of a business report). Their supply costs are high too but that's not a big deal if you use them rarely.

Why did you feel the need to explain this when as you've said I've already stated for photos? Nobody made a reco to use for doing a report.

Not sure if you are aware, but you can get 8x10 prints from a dye sub. For the dye sub market, their prices have definitely gotten much cheaper relative to themselves. They are more expensive that shitting $99 ink jet, but that's the point of this thread.

Inkjets work ok and get a lot less gunky if you use them frequently. The problem that I have (and I assume you do too), is if I'm printing a couple of times a year, it's hard to spend two or three times the amount on a laser printer than a cheak inkjet. Even though the laser printer is the right answer. I did end up getting a laser printer last year when my child was printing a lot from chromebooks and Chrome OS stopped supporting cloud print, but also didn't support my inkjet (via network or usb). Shopping at CDW Outlet helped a bunch with pricing, but you have to be in the shopping phase when the right inventory is there.

Canon's imagePrograf series don't gunk up, but they will use a lot of ink cleaning. It's also their most expensive model of inkjet (my Pro 1000 will print 17" wide, but is $1,300).