I've been giving this thread some thought (I do that sometimes) and it occurred to me to work out how much I pay for a set of cartridges for my Canon printer. It's about £50. So two sets of cartridges costs me slightly less that the printer (£110). So it does seem daft to pay so much when I could buy cheap cartridges, wear my printer out quicker, but buy another printer and still save money. However, one problem with this is that by using cheap cartridges the quality of my prints will gradually deteriorate but I won't notice. The second one is that I get used to a printer and don't really want to buy a new one. It's an interesting argument though. I get through about five sets of cartridges a year (just checked on my Amazon orders!), so I will spend about £250 a year. I could buy cheap cartridges for about a third of that, say £80, and buy another printer. Hmm . . .

Hmm, had that discussion with myself when I got the HP laser some years ago. So I made up a test sheet and printed it off - made 2 actually and put one in the filing cabinet and t'other in bright sunlight to see how it stood up. Then when it occurred to me - about every 12 - 15 months I printed another copy of the same sheet. Confirmed that the printer was still behaving reliably and that the toner was still the same quality.
Sadly the engine failed after some years - but by that time the printer owed me nothing.

I had to scrap an HP Laserjet 2100 yesterday
Nothing wrong with it, except it used a parallel port lead (permanently wired in) while the replacment Win7 PCs we're installing don't have parallel ports

At a rough guess I reckon its around 13 years old and still printing perfectly
The online user guide dates from 2000

It could still be used in a modern office as a network machine if attached to a jetdirect card, or other print server. Those old HP machines were quite simply indestructible

Yep, I was using a Netgear mini print server - about the size of a matchbox (remember matchboxes?) Never faltered - the only drawback being it was a one-way street; I couldn't read printer info on the computer.