From what you say, a colour laser may be better. I have both types and use them differently.
For high-quality glossy photos, a good inkjet is the way to go. No Laser printer can work with glossy photo paper, so you never get those kind of prints. (I tried using good glossy paper in my colour laser, and the toner just wiped off the finished print!) However, the Lexmark colour laser I have does very good colours with sharp detail - just not glossy photos. So to make full-colour signs or documents it is great. For "photos" (like 8 x 10, etc.) we put into a frame with front glass and hang on the wall, it is quite good. A printer like that is much more expensive up front for the printer itself than a good inkjet unit. The paper is not expensive - you just use normal white office paper. My printer uses four toner cartridges; the black one holds twice as much toner as the colours, since more of that is used. I always ensure that, unless I am printing a colour image, I set the printer to print only in black. Each cart cost me about $65 (in Canadian $). The black one lasts typically maybe 1200 prints, the colour ones each about 600 prints. A black-only print then costs about 5.4¢ per page plus paper cost. A full-colour sheet using all four toners costs about 38¢ per page for toner, plus the paper price of maybe 5¢. While I have had a few printer malfunction problems over several years, Lexmark has been excellent at helping to diagnose and ship replacement parts at very low cost, so I have not had any really expensive repairs.
Inkjet printers frequently are inexpensive to buy because the makers expect to make money selling you expensive ink. One thing to watch out for is how many ink cartridges a printer uses. the cheapest ones use a single cart containing all 4 ink colours, and you must replace that as soon as ONE ink runs out. A better choice is one with two carts - one just black that often will get used up faster, and one with the three colours. The fanciest ones (and more expensive, of course) able to do particularly accurate colours will have separate carts for each colour, AND more than three coloured carts. Using additional carts with pale blue and pale red (magenta) and maybe even grey allows more accurate colours in the lighter shades in a photo.
The old inkjet printers I have do have problems of clogged ink jets if not used for a while, just as you have had. On some I have been able to remove the print head, wipe its jets clean with a damp tissue, and then let that inkjet face sit on a wet tissue for a hour or two to "soak", then wiped dry, re-installed and done the head cleaning step a couple times. This usually has cleaned it to work.
Worst case, on almost all such printers you can remove and replace the print head with the jets and be back in business, but of course that costs money for the part. I had one Canon printer that got so old the replacement heads were not new, just re-conditioned, and some still did not work. Eventually that printer developed other problems and I discarded it.
I have had a couple of HP inkjet printers over the years - still do. They did excellent jobs on glossy photos if you use the right paper. They all had an interesting design feature. The ink replacement cartridges (one black, and one three-colour) all have the inkjet print head as part of the ink cartridge. So when you replace that cart, you also get a brand new inkjet print head. This makes those carts slightly more expensive to replace, but it's a quick and easy way to replace the print head and solve a problem with dried-up jets. To keep costs reduced with those, I often used ink refill kits to refill the carts until they actually did clog up and need replacement. Unfortunately one of these printers now seems to have other problems I may not be able to fix, but I've had it for over 20 years, so I can't complain there.
For many years now I find that almost the only photos I print are 4" x 6" "snapshot" prints from our digital cameras and phones. For those I have an Epson dedicated photo printer that does only that size. I had one of their original PictureMate printers (like a little grey lunch box) for years, long after they stopped making them. For a while I had bought a couple of old used ones and scavenged parts from those to keep one going, but ultimately they all failed. Then I got the newer version, the PictureMate P225 Charm, which I am using now. It also is no longer made, but I expect Epson has another similar model. They do excellent glossy full-colour 4 x 6 photos that come out dry and smudge-free immediately, and claim to have stable colours for 100 years - I cannot test that! For this, I buy genuine Epson T5846 kits containing one ink cartridge and 150 sheet of 4 x 6 glossy paper, and I do get just over 150 photos from that. (Epson also sells a kit with matte paper, but I don't use that.) In Canada I'm paying $55 per kit, so the cost is 36.7¢ per print, a bit less than a full-colour 8½ x 11 sheet from the Lexmark colour laser. If I need a glossy photo on heavy paper larger than 4 x 6, either I can try my larger HP inkjets with photo paper, or go to a print-your-own kiosk.
One last thought. I am more conscious of this issue because I worked in the coated fine paper industry and am familiar with papers and inks. Most printer makers carefully match up the ink system in their printers with the paper used to print on, and that can be important. You can be sure of good print quality, smudge-free prints, accurate colours, etc. if you stick with their recommendations. Changing to a different paper (even a paper that IS very good but from another maker) or ink may or may not work well. I have had good results with "compatible" inks and cartridges, but I always was careful to experiment with a new source in case it failed, and some did in various ways. As a small example, I recently tried a couple of "compatible" carts on my Epson PictureMate Charm with some spare genuine Epson paper. It all went very well and the photos were fine. BUT the yield of photo prints per cartridge was 'way down, making the potential $ savings nil or worse!
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