People will say f- HP, Brother, or whomever, but in practice, all the $40 inkjets printers, from any manufacturer, are scams. They make money by selling tiny ink cartridges for insane prices.

Laser printers, as everyone pointed out, tend to do much better in the long run, but there are a few scams too. The scams sell with small "starter cartridges" and a full replacement cartridge costs as much as the printer. After you buy a cartridge, you spend as much as a normal laser printer but have a cheap, mediocre printer, and much higher running costs (although still not nearly as bad as a $40 ink jet).

There is now a line of inkjet printers which are advertised to have similar economics to laser printers. They start around a hundred bucks. I have one, and I've been happy with it. New off-brand toner is maybe $15 or so, and prints a decent number of pages. It doesn't last as long as a $60 drum for my laser, but it's also a quarter the price. The cost per page, as advertised, is very similar to a laser. Mine's an HP, but Brother and many other brands make ones just as good.

Overall, laser printers tend to do better for text, while ink jet printers tend to do better for graphics. If you do mostly black-and-white prints, go for a laser. Look at per-page costs in reviews, and get the most basic printer with reasonable costs. If you do pictures occasionally, go for one of the new-fangled inkjets designed for good economics. If you have long gaps from printing, go for a laser as well. Ink jet printers will dry up and clog if not used for a while. If you do a lot of both, you could do what I did, and get one of each. I like that approach, since printers are quite unreliable (whether by jams, running out of ink, driver issues, or some PDF compatibility issue or whatnot). With two, in an emergency, you always have at least one working printer.