Well, I design for HP, so that's what I'm going to recommend. I work on only the high-end stuff, and not the low end, though I did set a strategy in place for some of the design of the hardware to make life easier for the user for those.
Sounds like you're set on Laser. That's what I do because the technology is infinitely more interesting. Laser is going to be more expensive, but there's some big pros to it. Toner doesn't dry out, and your pages won't be "wet". With that said, laser has improved its quality on photos quite a damned bit though, so you'd be surprised that the difference isn't as much as it used to be for photos on ink vs laser.
Highlighting laser prints doesn't work to well. Highlighting ink prints works pretty well.
To be fair, there's high end ($700 and above) ink printers out there from HP that will do automatic cleaning (spits ink into a reservoir) so that the print heads don't dry out. I've designed this flow for these.
Do you want a single function, or a multi function printer? Is scanning important to you?
Color or Mono?
In all fairness, if you want a basic Laserjet printer, so go visit Bestbuy, Staples, etc. Pick one that you will like. They will all plug up to a computer and print. You can't really go wrong.
If you want ink, I think the HP Envy Printer looks pretty cool....
