[SLL] Color laser printer for Linux?

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Feb 27, 2008, Glenn Stone wrote:
>On Wed, Feb 27, 2008 at 10:14:43AM -0800, John Locke wrote:
>>Jay Scherrer wrote:
>>>I have found that HP has been very friendly with Linux and CUPs 
>>>drivers. I have successfully set up my HP - office jet pro L7650 Which 
>>>handles: Fax, Two sided full color printing, Network, usb, Scanning, 
>>>with scan to network  (Samba) or memory devices directly plugged in. 
>>>Cost was less then $350 at Sam's Club. However this is not a laser but 
>>>a ink jet model.
>>HP makes an open source utility for managing their printers/scanners, so 
>>I'd say it's a pretty safe bet. Install the hplip package from your 
>>community repository of choice, and you'll get everything you need, 
>>including a GUI for setting up and managing the device. The printer ends 
>>up installed in CUPS, the scanner is visible in sane, everything just 
>>works. On my Ubuntu desktop, I even get a little notification in my tray 
>>when the ink gets low.
>
>Poked around at OfficeBigBox day before yesterday, and then brought my
>results home.  The upshot is that Dapper's rev of hplip is too old to drive
>the current generation of HP printers; if I want one of these little hotshots
>I'm going to have to upgrade.  Other than that, I can get a pretty
>fully-featured all-in-one inkjet (HP OJ 5610) for $109.  Inks are $20 for
>black hi-cap and $18 for color (which doesn't cover nearly as many pages).  
>
>I looked at Epson, which openprinting.org says has better printer drivers,
>but the all-in-ones they had were separate flatbed scanners rather than
>having an ADF.... phooey.  

One factor to consider when buying splatjets is how frequently you print,
and how they handle long periods without printing.  The HP printers are
(were) designed so that they don't have problems with long periods of
inactivity, while others may have issues with clogging, or the ink drying
in the print mechanism.

This is important to me as I have an HP Photosmart on which I may print 10
pages a month, using an HP 4M Plus for the bulk of my printing.

>Brother has a pair of little monochrome laser printers (HL-2040 and
>HL-2070N) in the same price range; they seem to need a little hackery to
>work right but otherwise once set up should do fine, and even the "N" (for
>network) model is under $100.  OTOH, buy two toners for this little guy and
>you've bought the printer again.... and you don't get any of the other fun
>features, like scanning or faxing.  

I'm an old-fashioned component stereo guy who prefers to have separate
printers and scanners so I don't have all my eggs in one basket.  I use
HylaFAX which is happy with a variety of input formats including
PostScript, PDF, plain-text, most image formats, and isn't tied to any
particular hardware (we use external MultiTech data/fax modems on a Linux
box of course :-).

Bill
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