A lot depends on your budget. Here's one big question: ink jet or laser? And second questions: colour or B/W? I assume form your post you do need colour at times, but often not. Well, on most printers you DO have a choice via its print options under Windows whether or not to use the colour inks. I always choose NOT unless I need the colour. HOWEVER, watch out for the really low priced ink jets. They use ONLY three colours and NO Black, so you ALWAYS use all three colours for any print job and go through ink fast!
Ink jet printers are cheaper than laser to buy for sure, and individual ink cartridges are less expensive that laser toner. But most toner carts last for a LOT more prints, so the cost per printed sheet (B/W only or coloured) tends to be less for laser printers.
Most laser printers now come with a NATIVE resolution of 600 dpi. Do not confuse this with "enhanced" resolution specs that really are software manipulation of the image while the actual ink or toner deposition system can only do the native resolution. Cheaper ink jets will do only 300 dpi often, although that is pretty good. Higher-quality ink jets can do 600 dpi. 600 dpi is sharper on fine details and edges. Even higher native resolution specs can be found in much more expensive printers of either type, but those are used almost always solely for VERY high quality graphics art work.
One BIG difference is in maintenance especially for printers NOT used frequently, and this DOES impact you.The fine jets in the ink jet print head tend to get clogged when the ink dries out when not in use. In many cases this can be fixed with a head cleaning cycle of the printer, but what that means is it forces a LOT of ink out of the head, trying to dissolve and flush out the dried ink. That wastes your ink. If that works you're OK, but if not you have to resort to more complicated efforts to dissolve the clog, OR to replacement. On some printers the ink head with its jets is part of the ink cartridge, so replacing all of the clogged cartridges does that job. That means you LOSE all the ink in them. In others the print head is a separate part, so you remove the ink carts temporarily and replace the print head in its carriage. A laser printer with cartridges of dry toner powder never has this issue. Such a printer used infrequently just keeps on printing when needed until the entire cartridge is empty. Then you replace the one empty cartridge - same as you would do with ink jet.
Saving money on ink or toner replacement cartridges, compared to buying genuine printer maker's carts, gets tricky. For sure the printer maker will tell you (with good reason) that you void your warranty on printer performance and problems when you use any non-original ink. And realistically many people have had problems with third-party inks or toners, although many do not. I have had a lot of success with third party inks and toners after some searching. With ink jets at one time you could buy kits to refill old cartridges. Almost all printer makers now put a small chip in each cartridge that does two functions. It carries a code to identify it to the printer as genuine, and it stores updated print use counts so it "knows" when it is "empty". To refill such a unit also means you need some way to alter the chip data to show no use / full cartridge. Alternatively you can buy third party cartridges with their own chip that mimics the one in a genuine cart. Sometimes those work, sometimes not. A related scheme is in my Brother laser printer - although its toner carts have a chip for identification, apparently the print count is kept in the printer's RAM and can be reset when a new toner cart is installed. Another scheme some have used is to pry the chip out of an old genuine cart and install it in a new third-party one, but that may or may not work. With ALL of these ways to evade the "genuine cartridge" chip system, you still have to deal with whether the ink or toner will work without causing problems like clogging jets or clumped toner, AND whether the ink density (and resulting fine colour tones) are correct. I have been fortunate over several ink jet and laser printers in using third-party ink or toner carts with no trouble, with the exception of some Epson dedicated 4" x 6" snapshot printers. For them I have found the genuine paper / ink cart packs are the most reliable and do yield the number of prints claimed.
One thing that colour laser pinters can NOT do (but a good ink jet can) is high-gloss photo prints. A good ink jet printer using the proper gloss paper can make excellent photos, and some more complicated ones with extra ink cartridges for light tones (5 to 9 carts total) are impressive! But the toner in a laser printer cannot fuse to most high-gloss papers, and the toner itself actually has little gloss, so you cannot nake such prints on that machine. You DO get very good MATTE finish photos on plain paper, though. I put mine in a frame behind a glass front to look better.
Bottom line: in my experience a colour laser printer does a great job on most of my work at a lower per-print cost, although the up-front cost of the printer is a REAL factor in making that choice. I am careful always on each document I print to specify in the print configuration options whether to use or not to use the colour toners. That saves a bunch of money on those carts.
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