That's because laser printers don't use ink! They use toner, and they heat up powdered toner and fuse it to the paper; if you print on a laser printer you should be able to run your fingers over a printed page and feel that the ink is very slightly raised.
Laser printers tend to be more expensive and much bulkier than inkjet printers, but if you can buy a used printer to share among friends a laser printer is the way to go. Almost all of the big printers that you see in offices and libraries are laser printers. They are faster, they are cheaper to print per page, and they tend to be built for enterprise use so they are usually hardier than inkjet printers.
The primary difference between inkjet and laserjet printers is image quality. If you need to print photos or things with very fine details you are probably going to want to use an inkjet printer. If you need to print a lot of pages of black and white text you are going to want a laser printer.
The big problems with inkjet printers are as follows:
They use a print head that has tiny nozzles that spray out the ink; if you don't use the printer frequently, the ink will dry in the nozzles and block more ink from coming out. Cleaning a print head is not terribly difficult, but a lot of people find it very intimidating (don't! here's a video that shows you how! It's easy!) and if you take it to a shop to do it it's probably going to cost more in time clean the print heads than it cost you to buy the printer because inkjet printers typically cost between $40 (back to school sales) and $200 for the low end ones.
The ink does actually dry up. Most people don't print enough to actually use the ink that comes in the starter cartridges before they dry up. Most people don't print more than a page or two a month, so there is basically no way they're going to use enough ink for 1500 pages before it dries out too much to print with. This is a huge advantage of laserjet, especially for color printing because most people also primarily print in black and white so it takes a looooong time to go through color cartridges.
Various printer companies (though mostly the motherfuckers at HP) have started making it impossible to use third party cartridges (needs and HP chip in the cartridge for the printer to recognize it) AND have started deactivating those chips after a certain period of time regardless of whether your ink is still useable, so once the chip deactivates you have to buy more ink.
This is how the ink subscription model works; they give you cartridges that are good for three months and then your printer stops printing unless you exchange those cartridges for new ones and you pay a monthly fee for this privilege. The subscription model only works well for people who print way, way, way, way more than the average person and for the printer company.
Fillable tank printers do get around some of this, because you can just keep adding ink, but they still have the print head problem and the other big problem with most inkjet printers:
They are fiddly tiny pieces of shit that were never really meant to be taken apart and put back together so disassembling them is tricky and you're likely to break something. It's like taking apart Ikea furniture. You probably CAN do it if you've got the right tools and you're careful, but it's going to take a lot of effort and the pieces might not reassemble well because they weren't designed to be taken apart, only put together.
Okay, so that's ink printers. Here are the problems with laser printers:
High cost of entry. A low-end, black and white laser printer is going to start at about $125. The toner for a black and white printer will be at least $50. A low-end color laser printer will probably cost at least $250 and toner will be about $200 to get all four colors.
They're much bigger and heavier; part of the appeal of inkjets is their portability. Laser printers, by and large, are not terribly portable.
May not include some of the wireless printing options. You might have to actually physically connect to the device, though this is less and less of an issue on newer printers.
Can be a lot more dangerous to work on. Laser printers use a component called a fuser to fuse toner to the paper; the fuser is, technically speaking, FULL OF ELECTRICITY. When I was just getting started at my job and was still much more "office admin" than "person who knows things about computers" I was attempting to clear a jam in an enormous third-hand office printer/copier with a damaged fuser once and it zapped me so hard that I had to go to the ER and get checked out because I hadn't stopped shaking for two hours after.
Parts are expensive and can be hard to find. A replacement fuser will likely cost half as much as the original printer did.
And again, ink and toner are different. Laser printers use toner, which is a dry powder and won't dry up or run out and most printer makers haven't started forcing toner replacement schedules or a toner subscription plan because laser printers are much more likely to be used by businesses and they can't pull the same shit that they do with home users.
Long story short, here's my advice on printers:
But okay so actually my advice is print as little as you possibly can and if you need to print a lot of black and white it's worthwhile to go to a print shop or a library unless that is cost prohibitive in which case I'd say try to find a functional, used laser printer and share it with friends.
If you need to print a lot of photos or things that look very nice, I'd recommend buying an inkjet to share among several people and I'd actually recommend going with one of the nicer, more expensive ones and learning how to put the effort into maintenance; if it's a fillable tank printer, so much the better.
But yeah I think that printers, even more than lawn mowers or cars or stand mixers, are something that individual people generally don't need to own and should function as part of a toolshare.
There are exceptions to this, of course. But if you're thinking about buying a printer - especially if you're thinking about buying one for school - you should think long and hard about how much you actually believe you're going to print. And if you do any printing for a business and your business is anything other than producing photographic quality prints, you should look at a laser printer because the cost over time is much better than an inkjet printer.
