New heads appear to cost under £100, so even if half the ink in every 127/70ml bottle were wasted on cleaning AND a new set of heads was needed with every ink refill, it would still end up being cheaper.

But again, I'm just trying to narrow down options, I'm not pro-ink nor anti-laser.

All the printers I used at work were laser printers and all of those at home were/are inkjet. It was certainly true that inkjets were a pain in the backside a few years ago, with printheads clogging up regularly if the printer wasn't used every day. The internet was full of "useful home remedies" for how to remove printheads on various models and whether to use water or alcohol or whatever to soak them.

For the last 5 years, I've been using a Canon MG5750 and in all that time, I think I've run a cleaning cycle twice. I know it runs its own cleaning cycle as well at start up, but I never buy Canon ink as this is about four times more expensive than the 3rd party alternative I've been buying for ages. Never really had a problem with it.

(YMMV)

https://www.google.com/search?q=mg5750%20clog

I actually laughed out loud. 

How to clean the print head, video. Film of some bloke holding print head under a tap.

In the past I've had Canon and Epson printers that resisted all and any cleaning. Maybe I've been lucky with the current one, or maybe the 3rd party ink doesn't clog as much.

The stuff of nightmares. I ran large format, 6-colour photo inkjet printers for ~10-years. When working they produced beautiful prints.

Most of the big commercial photo printers use very high quality inkjet or die-sublimation printers these days. Send your holiday snaps off in the post, or online, and that's where they'll end up. I strongly suspect that throwing away is a feature of these as opposed to cleaning.

I suspect in the low end, clogging is a feature not a bug.

At the very low end it's practically a free printer with every year's worth of ink. My printer isn't far off the bottom of the price range. I think I paid about £65 (100 CAD) for it, but a full set of inks from Canon is around £76 (for the large size). The printer gets quite a lot of use and I change the cartridges about 4 times a year, more for the black cartridges (it has 2) so if I was daft enough to stick with Canon ink I'd be spending maybe £350/year on ink. Which is why companies like HP have free starter subscriptions to their ink supply service. I'll be interested to see how the new "tank" models work out long term and how prone to clogging the print heads are.

So yeah, if the heads clog and I can't clean them, that's money in the bank for Canon/Epson/HP/Brother or whoever. 

Late to the party --

https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/best-all-in-one-printer/

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