I myself prefer inkjet. Mainly because I don’t really understand the laser printer operation, I can’t even name all the rollers, but the simplicity of pouring more ink into old cartridges and easy head replacement (built into cartridges in my case) is nice, as well as compactness when requiring color. Maybe when I’ll once decide to study it I’ll try a laser.

HP PSC 1315, somewhere around 20 years old. It has an absolutely botched USB replacement that’s not even fully inserted, but it’s somehow worked for years now.
It was my first soldering attempt. You’ll squirm now, I didn’t know what flux was. I thought there wasn’t enough heat and went to MAXIMUM. 520°C (968°F) cooked contacts. But somehow it works…

Hear me out, printers are relatively high-maintenance technology. I want some decent understanding to be able to deal with various faults first, but I am too lazy to study laser printers, so I use inkjet.

But actually, I kinda want a… dot matrix. 24-pin for sure, but hear me out, I want a slow one. I want to watch it and listen to it printing, so I want it to take enough time. I am not joking. Many times I used high DPI printing which takes 20 minutes per page (A4) and I was watching the heads the entire time.

My general advice to people when shopping for used printers is if it’s new enough to have a colour LCD, it’s too new. Ones like this with a 2x 16 character display are predominantly safe.

This rule holds for more manufacturers than you might expect.

For my sins, I did end up with an HP. But it’s a 2012 model (my specific one was built in 2017 however), well predating HP’s bullshit. It’s a colour A3 laser with Ethernet and automatic duplex, so I’m happy enough with it.