Printer Makers' Ploys

Ellen Spertus writes "The San Francisco Chronicle has an interesting article on printer makers' ploys, such as lying about print speeds and selling printers with crippled cartridges. I'm sure that slashdot readers could identify more deceptions. Are there any printers that actually live up to the manufacturers' claims, ideally with Linux support?"

lexmark and hp

[chunkwhite86]

Lexmark and HP LJ's have good linux support and come with good toner. I'm refering to the laser jets printers.

Re:Lexmark Z33

[Ctrl-Z]

I haven't had any trouble with the Epson Style Color 777 that I bought a year and a half ago. It works great with Linux. I remember when I got the printer, I checked linuxprinting.org [linuxprinting.org] and found that Lexmarks weren't very well supported at that time.

Samsung ML-1210

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a Samsung ML-1210 that came with some linux drivers, however the standard Redhat 7.x install seem to handle everything nicely as is. The printer was right at $180 when I bought it, and it has worked great. I have had it for almost a year now, and no complaints so far.

Linux printers.

[aardvaark]

Both Epson and HP are really pretty Linux friendly. They release info to the community, and I think Epson has actually written some Linux printer drivers, and released them open source. I chose an Epson printer after learning they are also very good about supporting their scanners with Linux.

I've purchased several printers and scanners from both HP and Epson over the years, and never felt like I was cheated or what have you. They've all worked under Linux without a hitch.

However, if you want absolute Linux compatibility, spring for a postscript printer. They will always work without a hitch, but are a tad spendy.

Lexmark supports Linux

[Whatthehellever]

I bought a Lexmark Z22 and Lexmark supports Linux right out of the box. Even their technical support staff (well, some of them) are Linux savvy.

modern printers

[PiGuy]

Most modern printers are terrible - they don't
support PostScript, they have no internal memory,
they hold a miniscule amount of paper, and they
get jammed often. My family's Lexmark inkjet is
case in point - it holds about 30 sheets, has no
memory, and only uses Lexmark's "jnl" format.
Laser printers are somewhat better, but I've no
expreience with them.

Me? I use an Apple Imagewriter II. Sure, it
doesn't support PS, but that's what ghostscript
is for (does a nice job, too). Never jams, has
unlimited paper supply (the paper is stored
externally), almost never gets jammed, and even
has 2KB memory in it, upgradable to 32KB! Most
printers die after a few years, but this one's
twelve years old and running strong!

Agreed!

[Jerky McNaughty]

I picked up a 2200dse (duplexing, USB/parallel but no network) for just over $700. It has built-in PostScript which makes setup under UNIX-like OSes easy and eliminates the need for ghostscript which I've used over the last eight years. HP had a deal where you buy an additional toner cartridge at the same time and get 16 MB of RAM free. I sprang for it. I also picked up a 610n JetDirect 10/100 card off of eBay reasonably cheap. It's quite nice to have it on my network at home with minimal setup hassles.

Great quality printing at a not-too-unreasonable price. My previous printer (HP LJ 4L, which I paid $700 for back in, oh, late 1993/early 1994) ran without a single problem around 15K-20K sheets---hopefully this will last as long or longer.

Re:HP's

[mickwd]

If you're an unfortunate owner of an HP DJ9xx class printer (e.g. HP DeskJet 970) which the HP Linux driver doesn't (yet) support in hi-resolution printing mode, please see this entry in the Sourceforge forums for the HP Inkjet Driver project for a patch to HPIJS to support hi-res printing in 1200x1200 mode (and other enhancements).

It's here. [sourceforge.net]

The best printer on Earth (that we can afford)

[pla]

About two years ago, I bought a Brother HL-1270N. Around $450, but probably cheaper today (and still competitive as a reasonably high-end home and small-office printer).

It does 12ppm, connects directly to 100bt ethernet (so I don't need a slave PC as a print server), and of course it works just fine with Linux (supports PCL6 and PS2).

Black-and-white laser, but *very* good quality (1200x600... At 25-up, I can still read a 10pt font, though I need a magnifying glass to do so) and a high throughput make it thge single best printer I have ever used (not just owned, used... at my previous job, we had a variety of serious high-end HP lasers, y'know, the $15k type) and they all SUCKED in comparison).

Not as cheap as a chinsy little $80 color inkjet, but, 99.9% of the time I care more about printing speed and quality than having color on my printouts. And when I do, I visit Kinkos (If I actually need a color document, you can bet I won't accept the crappy quality of those $80 inkjets).

Incidentally, for quite a lot less (around $150) you can get the HL-1240. It has very similar stats (my parents have one of these, and it impressed me enough to get the 1270N for myself), except no ethernet and half the memory. If you don't mind needing a PC to act as a print server for it, this makes a GREAT deal on an amazing printer.

If HP made automobiles

[darylp]

They'd roll off the production line with half a tank of petrol, but if you ever wanted to fill them up again you'd need to buy a new HP-approved carburettor.

Inkjet printers are one of the worst IT scams in the business. Ink should be a commodity, like fuel. We shouldn't have to be locked in to the tyranny of overpriced printer cartridges with built in heads and the like.

Re:Lexmark inkjets and Epson inkjets

[nphillips]

I will second the comment about Epson Inkjet. I have a Photo 785EX and had no problem getting my Linux box to talk to it, via CUPS and gimp-print. And the quality is phenomonial. Most people can not tell the borderless 4x6in prints are NOT photo prints.

Re:Agreed!

[afidel]

I think time got to the plastic more than wear, the LJ series typically has routine maint times around 200-300K pages (bigger models like the 8150 are around 350K), and they typically last 2-3 main cycles before things become bad enough to put them out to pasture in high use environments. I have serviced several LJ3 and LJ4's where a single plastic gear had just gotten old and brittle and shattered, after replacing said gear the printers typically last another couple years.

6L

[PW2]

When I bought this printer (new) over 5 years ago, I didn't know it came with a toner cartridge so I bought an extra one -- I still have the extra one in the box as the first toner cartridge is still working great. Buy a laser printer!

Re:You get what you pay for.

[Hollins]

The HP 5L had a terrible feed problem because they relied on gravity to pull in the paper. They would like to suck in 8 pages at a time. I owned one that had this problem, and found a lot of users online complaining about it. It seemed to crop up after a couple thousand pages. HP told users to be sure their printers were on stable, horizontal surfaces (duh), but not much else.

I don't know if this was corrected in the 6L, but I won't be buying a gravity feed printer again.

HP Personal & Small Business LaserJets.

[thesolo]

I own an HP LaserJet 1200 Personal printer, and it is by far the best home printer I have ever purchased. It's very fast for a personal model, 15 PPM, with the first page always printed within 10 seconds of the print command. Size-scalable paper trays, which are great for envelope printing, and it supports an addon module for scanning & copying. Even the price isn't too bad, Pricewatch.com has it for less than $400.00 US.

And if you're wondering what OS it works under, well, you're in luck. It is fully PostScript compatible, and works under Windows, MacOS, and Linux. I've used it under all 3 with perfect results. HP gets a big thumb up from me with this printer.

Re:lexmark/the "X" series multifunction printers

[zoward]

I got a Lexmark X73 multifunction printer/scanner/copier from my wife as a Christmas gift last year. The "X" series of multifunction printers (X63, X73, and X83) don't have ANY Linux support whatsoever. Much of their output is driven through (Windows) software. I e-mailed them asking about PCL support, postscript, or raw ouput support I couold use for Linux. I also offered to work on a driver for it if they sent me specs. What I got was the e-mail equivalent of a form letter telling me that the X73 had no support for any platform except Windows, and that the interface to it was proprietary (ie, locked up tighter than a drum).

After hooking it up to my wife's Windows PC, I also found I couldn't write to it from any other box on a network, even another Windows box, as the driver for it won't install or run correctly unless it finds the printer hanging off a USB port on the box you're installing or printing from.

I stayed with my battle-scarred HP Deskjet 400, which happily prints from Windows or Linux, and across the network via Samba, etc. Meanwhile, my wife loves the X73...although it does cost us a fortune in cartridges...

Brother Lasers are Excellent

[lemkebeth]

I've been burned by Epson in the past with regards to their 5700i Laser printer and not updating the Mac driver for OS X.

After that I resolved to only use PostScript laser printers and my current one is a Brother HL-1650 with an internal printer server installed (with Ethernet jack)

It is black and white but, lies up to Brother's claims very well.

My advice is that if you are buying an inject you are buying lot of ink all the time (have yet to replace the toner cartridge in the HL-1650 and I've had it since last March)

Me, I hate inkjets.

Now, if you print to Linux using it it should work even though you will need a PPD (it is PostScript Level 3) to use the Duplex unit without using the printer control panel or the web admin tools.

Re:lexmark and hp

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought a lexmark e210 laser printer for $99 new (after rebate a few months ago). The box said linux was supported (I'm a bsd man myself, but close enough). Linux support meant a version of ghost script 5 that expected to be on a red-hat system. Also, it's a "winprinter" -- no built in font, etc., the printer driver does all the work.

Anyhow, last week I was revisiting the issue, and found that the e210 is just a rebranded samsung smart-gdi printer, and there's a ghost-script patch. I checked my version of ghostscript, and it was builtin. woohoo! After finding the parallel port, I can now print from BSD.

It's a lot slower printing than under Windows, but is otherwise fine. linuxprinting.org has good info on what printers work, who is down with open source, etc. They say some of the higher priced lexmark lasers support pcl and ps natively. Cool.

Re:My Printer of Choice

[masterkool]

Here [sourceforge.net] is a link to the HP Source Forge site. It has a lot of information on Linux printing

IBM Network 24 printers run at rated speed

[gelfling]

We runs scads of these and they can run as fast as one side/~2 sec for simple text, hardware fonts etc. They are particularly well suited to PDF output and the speed is unaffected by 2-up or 4-up or duplex. Plus they rarely break down so you can send a 300 print job to the printer w/o worrying that it'll jam on page 179.

Re:Samsung

[Deosyne]

I have to second the recommend for a Samsung. I have an ML-1210 that has been a rock solid performer, and was trivial to set up in Linux (Debian even, though only Redhat is mentioned by name in the docs). They make it very obvious that the cartridge included is strictly a starter rated at only 1,000 pages, and coincidentally I have just started to get blank lines indicating that the toner is running low, so I ran a demo page to get the page count: 1,243. And I don't even use the Toner Save feature. For laser printing with such great performance, my ML-1210 was a fucking steal at only $180. Highly recommended.

Re:You get what you pay for.

[meduse]

I too had this problem with a 6L. One day, I found this support page [hp.com] on HP's site. They had a fix. Their so-called "Seperation Pad" is basically a piece of sticker to put on the feeder. They shipped me the fix to Canada from UK at absolutely no cost. I did not have a single paper jam ever since.

That's what I call great support.

Now, checking if the fix exists for the 5L is left as an exercice...

Solution for inkjets

[karlandtanya]

I've had good success with epson printers in linux. I had an epson stylus photo 1200 (6 color), which I gave to my sister, a photographer. Currently, my wife and I have a 980 (4-color). With CUPS and gimp-print, my printing looks beautiful. There is a utility (epsutil?) that I use to get ink levels, reset the printer, etc. I NEVER use epson inks or paper. There are plenty of aftermarket solutions for paper. For ink, I use a continuous flow system and bulk inks from MIS Supply [inksupply.com] It's never clogged or dripped, and when I screwed it up by causing a siphon, MIS sent me a new cf cartridge and a set of regular cartridges to use in the meantime.

Re:Does reporter ignorance really equal "ploys"?

[alcmena]

Well, the monitor people are getting better. A couple years ago you couldn't find "viewable size" anywhere on the box. And LCDs are "true" size -- not that inch-behind-the-bezel size.

If memory serves me, this was due to a law passing and not due to the kindness in the hearts of CRT manufacturers. I could be wrong, but I seem to remember the "viewable size" being a big enough issue a few years back that a law was passed requiring the actual display size to be printed on the outside of the box.

Re:Beware HP

[Syn Ack]

Several of the ink refil companies provide software to reset this chip into thinking the cartridge is new. Check out google and the links below.

http://www.itosn.com/ilrs/introduc.htm [itosn.com]

http://www.inkrefill.ca/ [inkrefill.ca]

Cheers,

Syn Ack.