For general printing I've got a Samsung ML-2525 A4 laser printer. Was amazing value for money at about £50 including a full toner cartridge, which is said to last about 40,000 pages, I've had a while now and have printed a lot with it, and it still shows over 80% toner so in the end will prove much cheaper than using any ink jet printer. For text printing you will agree with me that you really can't beat a laser printer. And for speed of printing it is brilliant too. After the initial page, which obviously takes a couple of seconds from clicking print, for the printer to warm up and get up to speed, it then turns pages out as fast as it can pick them up from the paper tray. Highly recommend everyone get one of these cheap Samsung laser printers if you don't have one already for general purpose printing.

For more specific colour printing I've got an A3+ (B3) HP B9180, which is a professional colour pigment printer. It is quite a monster of a machine but outputs amazing studio/gallery quality prints. It has some great features such as automatic self calibration, self cleaning heads, and 8 very large ink tanks. Each replacement ink cartridge is quite expensive but because they are so large they do last quite some time, although the printer's daily head cleaning/nozzle clog checking cycle does slowly deplete them too.

The B9180 also supports fine art papers, and whilst the cheapest glossy photo paper produces great prints, it is the matte papers that really show what the printer can do, and with 2 dedicated black inks and a light grey it also produced some amazing black and white prints, which a lot of colour printers struggle to do due to having to mix colours to generate the complete b/w tonal range.

I would never use third party cartridges in the B9180, although the continuous ink systems available have been tempting. What these do is replace the ink cartridges with their own dummy cartridges which have feeder tubes to much larger external ink tanks which can just be topped up as and when needed, so the printer never runs out, never needing to replace the cartridges. The initial cost of a continuous ink system is about the same as a full set of 8 inks for the printer (£160), but after that investment just buying ink to refill the tanks is much cheaper, so if I were doing a large volume of printing I would definitely invest in one. But at the moment I'm probably only replacing single cartridges when they deplete a maximum of once a year at most.

Another cool feature of this printer is the special media trap. You open out the back of the printer, and then fold down a section of the front (above the main output tray), then you can feed whatever you want through the printer in a straight path, so it can print on pretty much anything, and as it is pigment based ink, rather than dye, it will print onto any surface.

Regarding third party ink cartridges. I would avoid them. They might seem a great deal at the time, but they will slowly destroy a printer's printhead as the ink is not the same formula as the genuine inks. The makers develop the inks for the specific ink jet nozzle sizes to stop them clogging, and also to create the best output. Third party inks are thicker and won't produce the same results. They are also not the same consistency so run out much faster. False economy.

The only time I have used third party inks is for an old HP all-in-one printer we still have. We were given a load of compatible cartridges free so thought we would just use them up as we had replaced the printer for proper office printing, and actually that has so far been running fine with the third party inks and is mostly just used as a photocopier these days.
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