If your printing photographs or graphics with a lot of shading as opposed to spot colour (blocks of the exact same colour) then my experience is that a laser is pretty much the wrong way to go. That and good colour laser printers are not particularly cheap to buy and consumable costs of the cheaper ones are a real killer.
Personally I'd like to say "get a dye sub printer like one of the Canon CP printers" but you need to note that they are really only good for post cards rather than, say, greeting cards (in fact, at least here in Australia, getting any other paper for them other than the postcard media packs is pretty much impossible) .... though, of course, the real bummer is you can't print above 4x6 size
That said they are very good image quality wise, cheap to buy and have reasonably priced consumables.
Street price here for the CP 720 is around $130 AUD and $36 AUD for a media pack of 3x 33 cards + 3 dye ribbons)
Their image quality is outstanding - far better than their cost suggests - in fact a lot of the smaller photo booth places use commercial dye sub printers based on the same technology rather than large, expensive, wet chemical based photolab machines.
I've found they print a little dark so you need to adjust that either in your original image or through the print dialogue box - but colour wise they offer rich vibrant photo's at , or near, commercial lab printout quality.
For home use they are better than anything short of an expensive (e.g. 8 colour) ink jet printing on top quality pro photo paper.
The dye sub prints are automatically coated with a protective layer in the last stage of printing and the print longevity is good. I have some old ones from when I first got my CP 200 3 years ago, they are pinned on my work's notice board and get full unprotected exposure to air and light all day and they look as if they are as bright and "punchy" as when I first printed them - other peoples ink jet printouts on the same board have faded considerably after less than a year or so and look all washed out.
Other than that try see what some of the more consumer and small business based print shops will do - my local independent prosumer Apple dealer is just in the process of installing a full photo lab set up and will print greeting cards on photo paper with plain (non brand stamped) writable reverse so you can write or get them to print a message on them. For 100 or more they are talking about offering them at the same price as good quality stock greeting cards purchased in the same quantity.