Horses for Courses
Inkjets have a vastly superior colour space over any colour laser printer by a significant size factor. If you need to print top quality photos or other images you wouldnt use a laser printer. You would only use a laser printer for soft proofing.
Canon many years ago produced a cartridge that replaced the inks and turned the printer in to a scanner. It worked quite well but everyone needs/uses much higher resolution nowadays.
I worked for Canon for over 17 years and bought a BJ20 on staff purchase to use at home. Over £300 list price. It worked great but the ink was water soluble and if my stock sheets for parts in my car got wet it was end of stock sheets and stock control out the window. Cartridges were so expensive on staff purchase even then I bought 3rd party cartridges or refill inks. The refill inks weren't as water soluble - so they were actually better.
I bought an early colour bubblejet MFD based on the the BJC4000 it was great but they never produced drivers for anything other than Windows 95/98. It would still FAX or scan with the inks low. But it was horrendously expensive to run..
Since leaving Canon I've used only Epson printers/scanners and a MFD. The MFD still works to scan even on low/no ink either in push or pull scanning modes to a Debian desktop.
When everything went digital/multi function at my customers businesses I spent lots of time setting everything up on the network for them. If they had multiple devices for everything that was fine. But I cant recount how many small customers such as a single accountant or financial adviser I would suggest putting their old scanners/faxes and printers in to a cupboard to keep as an emergency. The advantage of a single do everything device soon becomes a nightmare if you have an E000/E030 or similar error. Eggs all in one basket springs to mind. For big offices it is still a pain but they will live with it if they can walk to another coffee machine to get to the next printer/device
Regarding FAX it is still used as someone has already suggested because you can get a receipt to prove it was received by someone/FAX. It doesnt prove who read it but is accepted in courts of having sent documents. IF you have sent it to the right telephone number of course!
Legal documents to courts would have to be on set size papers according to which country they were in or for. Until inkjets became more complex then it wouldnt matter if the paper inserted was A4, Ltr, Argentinian legal etc. The printer will just print out to what it thinks is there and the formatting would all go wrong or print off the sides. With a laser printer you could watch them stall if it had the wrong paper inserted. Canon used a series of switches at the back of cassettes to configure the paper size and hundreds of customers placed calls for their MFD office machine saying things such as Insert A4 paper because it believed it had Ltr loaded due to damaged paper from a paper jam being incorrectly removed going down the back of the cassette and fooling the switches.
Just like all technology. Dot matrix, Thermal, inkjet, laser/toner all have their benefits and pitfalls.
Inkjets dont need a hot fuser and all the errors that can occur. They dont need pressure rollers to assist the fusing process. Lasers that dont use pressure rollers don't fix/fuse the toner to heavy quality layered papers. Cold fused toners produce a shiny surface and the inherent danger of anyone working on such high pressure systems. Still thinking of Canon machines not necessarily digital printers or MFD's. An old cold fuse NP120 series copier had advantages over the NP150 heated rollers of the same era and had some disadvantages. The same with GP200/215 series MFD's that used a low pressure surface fusing over IR 2200's that came later.
I worked for Canon but I rather suspect the same could be said about devices and technology from all office and consumer equipment manufacturers. :)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
