To me, ink is a rip-off pretty much everywhere. More expensive than blood plasma. Riiight.
The only use-case I can see is for photo printing, where you have like 8 color tanks and specialty glossy paper. But you better be a photo buff to get your money's worth out of that, because otherwise you will constantly fight print quality issues from dried out tanks.
Couple years back I wanted a printer for my side businesses and went with a HP LaserJet 500 color M551dn (CF082A). Reasons:
- Full Windows and Linux support, with every single feature fully working in both operating systems. I even tweaked the CUPS PPD file a little to fully use all printer features and correct some copy-paste mistakes... expert enough? ;-)
- CMYK color laser that can do 1200x1200dpi, without tricks, although "RET 3600" is available
- That particular model was sold for many years (2011-2015 I think) and in large numbers, increasing chances of spare parts and refurb toner; a premium rainbow kit for 11000 black 6000 color pages was 37 EUR per color last time I checked
- If you google, pretty much no complaints about this printer
- Duplexer to print on both sides
- 10/100/1000 ethernet; Wifi would have been great but the available options are access points for clients, not to hook up to your own wifi as a client
- Below 1 watts in aggressive standby setting
- Bought CF084A 3rd paper tray for business paper. Printer can in theory now hold 100+500+500=1100 pages of paper
- In this model OS is on a 8 GB SSD instead of HDD; I picked the CF082A for this purpose
- There is/was a 646-page repair manual available on some shady web site so I could go full Louis Rossmann if I wanted to
- Paid (pre-covid prices) only 180 euro for only 20k page printed printer and another 120 euro for the new-in-box 3rd tray on ebay
- There is a more blueish 1st model and a more greyish 2nd model, got the greyish facelift (rather accidentally though)
Only drawback is that thing weighs like 40 kg and is rather large, so you need two people to carry it if you don't want to ding it.
One model later than this M551dn, I think it was the M553, HP began having printing dimension problems, where full A4 length printouts were a couple millimeters longer than indicated by software. Someone from a German (of course) engineering consultancy complained about this on HP forums, because their technical printouts were off. Case was closed by HP without a word as "spam". Phew. They also ramped up their refurb toner fight in later models with sneakier chips and more patents.
So for me the M551dn really is the "beef king".