Fujiflyer,
Unfortunately the life cycle of a printer is four years no matter what make or type of printer you choose for.... What you can do is try to save on the printing cost over those years with a correct choice of printer. Now I don't know what kind of a user you are (business, consumer, consumer with kids printing off the web) but I always try to steer the consumer away from using a colour laser printer privately. Yes it is cheap in the actual printing cost 3 cents per page 5% yield, but if you also take overall quality of the colour prints and the almost immediate depreciation of the machine into consideration... to give you an idea, a good Epson colour laser Acculaser C900 comes in at GBP 550.00.
Now, if you don't care much for colour prints but would like to be able to print some nice photo's it may be an idea for you to purchase a B/ W laser printer (as mentioned by NAC inc before) and have a dedicated photo printer on the side. I am personally not fond of dedicated photo printers as I find the quality of the paper used for them horrific. My choice would be find the quality that comes out of a Epson Photo stylus 935 or Canon I560 (you can change the print head with this one) absolutely fabulous. And you can also make regular b/w prints on them and if the kids want to print of off the web just set the printer to low ink usage.
As for the future, we are looking at a full shift within the print industry from laser to Inkjet techknowledgy mainly due to the digital revolution, the quality of inkjet photo prints and the lower print cost due to after market inkts. It is even rumoured that we are going towards full web based photo albums and web-based printing service for a next day delivery.
Does this help you any further?
