Thats what I believed, too. But it is not true any more for "bigger" printers. For normal SOHO use I would prefer a laser any time, too, beacuse it's more rugged, but who knows how much the original poster really wants to print in color?
I'll give you a comparison in Euros, from this website: http://www.druckerchannel.de
Who knows? Maybe toner is cheaper and ink is more expensive in the US. But here the difference is not even funny: (for color that is)
Prices are for the standardized ISO test pages and the original toner/ink. Maybe you can hunt for vastly different prices with refills but it's a hunt and you have to find quality. I think that if the original toner/ink gives you a nice price, refills should be even cheaper by a comparable amount for each printer so that the difference in costs per page stays about the same between the compared printers.
Your Brother would cost me €193 to buy and with the original toner I would have to pay 13 cents for a color page and 1.5 cents for b/w,
€40 for 4000 pages of black toner
€99 for 3500 pages of each color
€119 every 25000 for a drum kit
€77 every 50000 for a transfer unit
€14 every 5000 for a waste toner box
Epson B510dn 0.8 cents b/w and 3.1 cents color
€58 for 8000 pages of black ink
€52 for 7000 pages for each of the three colors
€15 every 35000 pages for the waste ink box
The printer itself is available for €400
Now heres an expensive color laser with cheap toner costs:
The Xerox Colorqube 8870DN color laserprinter costs €2000 and you have to pay 3.5 cents for each ISO color page.
Here is a a color laser theat costs a little bit less than the Epson to buy:
The Kyocera FS-C5250DN color laser costs €380 and you have to pay 8.3 cents for each ISO color page. (Very nice printer)
Its €82 for 7000 pages of black toner and €90 for 5000 pages of toner for each color.
Bot the Epson and the Kyocera are rock solid and you can get on site maintainance contracts. Don't compare them with a cheap hobyyist printer that will be a pain to maintain.
And while I'm at it, here's the multifunction color laser Lexmark X748de: 6.7 cents per color page, 1.4 cents b/w
See, just like I said it's nice for printing black and white unlike some color laser vendors who also gouge you on black toner.
But it's a €2000 initial purchase price.
€162 for 12000 pages of black toner
€190 for 10000 pages of each color
€92 every 20000 pages for a drum kit (but you can get away with lying to the printer and use the old drums some more)
€7 every 25000 pages for a waste toner box.
Very solid, if you want to have a nice color laser that works as a copier, too. Its a flatbed scanner with a document feed and it scans both sides of the page.
I have used all of these printers but the Xerox and the brother. The Lexmark and the Kyocera are rock solid in typical laser fashion. The Epson can be finicky feeding paper. The 500 page bootom try is suspectible to paper orientation problems. See the arrow on the side each 500 page ream of paper? Thats the side the Epson wants to print on first. No such problems with the smaller top feed. Normally I do not like Inkjets, but we use the Epson every day, so nothing dries up inside.