Inkjet printers are the most viable printer option to the home user – you have a cartridge (the amount of cartridges depends on if your printer’s just black & white, or color and black & white – and some color inkjets have separate cartridges for each color too) full of ink. The nozzle in the printer head is fed ink from the cartridge(s) and sprays a fine mist of ink onto the page. Color inkjets spray all four colours simultaneously onto the page (lightest colour first, then merely highlighting the image with the other colours to get the right combination to produce the final image). There’s also two types of color inkjet printers, some using the Red Green Blue combination of raw colours in the cartridge(s), and others use the Cyan Magenta Yellow combination, and the black is the Key color (this is the CMYK combination used in commercial printing).
Inkjets are cost-effective for small to medium print runs if you’re not after professional reprographic quality. However, buying ink for the printers can sometimes cost almost as much as the printers themselves as the printers seemed to sell for at or below cost while the ink remains comparatively expensive. I believe that printer companies profit mostly from ink cartridge sales.
The quality attainable by some high-resolution printers from Epson, HP and 
Canon comes close to true photo quality. With good quality paper and a high-resolution original digital image, very high-quality images can be produced. However, if you’re after that really crisp, professional look to your prints, you’re best going with a color laserjet printer.
