Is it a bad idea to purchase a colour printer for only occasional colour printing?

I am looking into purchasing my first laser printer. We do not print often and when we do it is almost always black and white text documents. Although we do not do much colour printing I do not want to lose the capability to do so. I was hoping that I could just refill the black toner as needed and I am thinking that the colour toner that comes in the printer when I buy it will last me a very long time as I planned on setting the default to always print black and white. I have a few questions that I was hoping someone could answer for me.

1. Is it a bad idea to purchase a colour printer and hardly ever print in colour?
2. Will the colour still be used or run out faster then I think it will. I am thinking I will go years just using what originally comes in the printer if I have it set to default to black and white and change it very rarely.
3. Do any colour printers still use high yield black toner so that I can save costs on black and white printing?

Thank you in advance for any help you can offer and if you have any suggestions on a good unit it would be appreciated too. I am looking for something with wifi and a scanner would be really nice too. I will never be printing photos or anything like that. Mostly basic text documents.

 

A few thoughts:

I've found a laser is much better than an inkjet for this situation due to inkjets frequently getting clogged heads or other ink jet problems from sitting without use for too long. In a best case with the inkjet, if it sits too long you waste ink with head cleaning, and in a worst case you waste time on bad prints and excessive head cleaning needed. It's best to keep any inkjet printing regularly in my experience or aggravation goes up.

A color laser does have more durable parts to wear than a black and white machine.

Printing lots of black and white on a color laser will impact the color quality, at some point. So if you print 50,000 black and white text prints and then need to print 100 color photos, you may find the color quality has been impacted as the drums may still be rotating the whole time, the transfer belt may have wear, you may get some toner somewhere it shouldn't be (on a window or on a roller under the belt, etc.) simply from running. If your overall volume is low you may never reach this point.

All printers like to run at least once a month. If a printer sits for months powered off, I've found quality usually suffers and takes a while to work out. E.g. hard spots in rollers, simple dust accumulation on pickup wheels, etc.

A very small amount of color toner is usually used for calibration. A larger cost would be the wear on the color drums, transfer belt, etc. and probably a more expensive fuser and possibly slightly more expensive black toner and drum / yeild depending on the model (smaller printer = more expensive toner/drum per print usually and black and white = cheaper toner/drum usually than equal size color machine)

 

Thank you for your help Jeff. So it looks like I am on the right track and a colour laser printer could be the right choice for me. I have had all of the problems that you mentioned with inkjets which is why we are not going that route again. As for wear and tear on the parts affecting the colour quality and costs...as you said, we will not have that kind of volume on the machine so I don't see that being an issue, or at least it should not be for a long time. We will use it once a month for sure and probably print 100 pages a month at the most. Do you have any advice on choosing a printer?