I used to have a cheap Samsung laser printer, with "Xerox" branded around it. In addition to useless copy protection technology applied to the toner cartridges (the physically compatible and cheaper "Samsung"-branded toner didn't work, but the "Xerox"-branded toner, for more money, worked fine), one of the plastic bits deep in the paper path died and that was its end.

Our current printer at home is a workgroup-grade Samsung CLP-620ND. This monster runs double-sided color and cost only $310 in 2010. (The newest CLP-680ND is a similar price. Samsung offers one with a scanner and such built-in that's double that price.)

This time around, when the toner ran out, I bought third-party toner. One of the colors had some issues (more copy protection?) and they promptly sent me a replacement.

Three years in, it's still working fine for our light-duty use. I'd recommend one for anything short of photo printing, at which it would presumably suck. My only caveat is that the Samsung print drivers on my Mac have a check-box for "black optimization" which basically takes RGB values of (0,0,0) and maps them to no color and all black toner. If you don't check that box, then black text will have undesirable color halos around it. Why on earth this isn't the default setting for the printer, and why on earth there's no way to check that box once and have the Mac remember the setting... I'll never know.