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http://www.linuxprinting.org/

Without the HPIJS or GIMP-print drivers, my HP's would basically be paper weights, HP's drivers are so bad.

Still, after a long history with them, I've switched to Epson. Never buying HP again. I love that the open source community makes my HP stuff work, but when I pay for "Mac supported" hardware, I don't want to have to rely on the goodwill of others to make it work.

Angostura's right that GIMP-print drivers might be worth looking into. But I have an OfficeJet G55xi, and the HPIJS drivers are by FAR the best. Better than anything by HP or in GIMP Print. You should give them a shot.

Lexmark produces two lines of printer: the Optras and the Color Jetprinters. The Optras are business-focused printers with the unique characteristic that every Optra supports Postscript and PCL; no other vendor has such uniform support for standardized printing languages. As a result of this, every Optra is 100% supported by free software. The Color Jetprinters are consumer-focused printers with the exact opposite characteristics: not a one of them supports any standard printing language, and not a one of them is 100% supported by free software.

The two groups in the company are very much separate, although the occasional Optra product is produced by taking a reasonable Color Jetprinter and nailing an Optra-style mainboard onto the back; this produces a Postscript/PCL networkable inkjet (like the Optra 40, for example). Efforts to obtain programming information for the Color Jetprinter protocols have been unsuccessful and will probably remain that way; Lexmark apparently feels that the details of the protocol reveal some of the engineering techniques they use to make the Color Jetprinters so competitively inexpensive.

Look here for specific details on the HP Laserjet 1012.

Look here for specific details on the HP Laserjet 1012.

Here is a package that allows the use of PostScript Level 1 printers, like the original LaserWriter, under Mac OS X.

My Canon A40 works just fine in Linux, using Digikam (via gphoto2). A large number of Canon and Minota cameras are supported under Linux. Also, many Canon and Minolta printers are supported.

I agree about a native PSP for Linux - that would rock - but have you tried it with Wine?

My Canon A40 works just fine in Linux, using Digikam (via gphoto2). A large number of Canon and Minota cameras are supported under Linux. Also, many Canon and Minolta printers are supported.

I agree about a native PSP for Linux - that would rock - but have you tried it with Wine?

Ah, but I don't understand... Lexmark was one of the first printer companies to offer drivers (and now even a developer kit) for Linux. In fact, for many models, foomatic recommends the Lexmark drivers over their own, suggesting you foomaticize them to use CUPS.

[snip...]There are two brands worth considering for use with free software...Hewlett-Packard
Most of the HP inkjet line is supported using a driver provided by HP. Most newer HP models produce very good photo and text output. Duplex printing on paper sizes up to A3 are also supported. ... certainly for most consumer and business use it is quite suitable....HP' "hpijs" driver is provided under a free license;

• the hpijs driver has worked out of the box on 'most every distro and on the BSDs that I've tried it on
  
• I didn't say 'most laptops work with Linux' (oh, brave new world) but rather that ' latest laptops' do, and can be shipped with them
  
• They certainly *did* sponser/employ Bruce Perens, do still employ Bdale as their Linux CTO
• The esr quote you mentioned is from December 2000 and I think they've addressed a lot of those issues

Try linuxprinting.org

Usually pretty easy to find good drivers there. They make foomatic.

After painstakingly removing the words "what the fuck does that mean" and "office space" from my Google search, I found good explanation

It (more or less) means the printer thinks you don't have the right kind of paper.

Some distros suck at recognizing some configurations, while another distro will recognize it without problems. A pain in the butt, but go figure.

You didn't mention which distro(s) you tried, but first try the Knoppix live CD here or here. Its hardware recognition is very good and if it recognizes your hardware, it takes about 20 minutes to install to your hard drive (YMMV).

Regarding printers. Some printers are better supported under Linux than others. Go here to see how well your printer is supported. Go here for more help.

Check your scanner compatibility here. And find more help here.

If you still can't get Linux to work, stick with windows, it's not that bad.

Some distros suck at recognizing some configurations, while another distro will recognize it without problems. A pain in the butt, but go figure.

You didn't mention which distro(s) you tried, but first try the Knoppix live CD here or here. Its hardware recognition is very good and if it recognizes your hardware, it takes about 20 minutes to install to your hard drive (YMMV).

Regarding printers. Some printers are better supported under Linux than others. Go here to see how well your printer is supported. Go here for more help.

Check your scanner compatibility here. And find more help here.

If you still can't get Linux to work, stick with windows, it's not that bad.

I have a laser printer--but Canon seems to be the best deal in inkjets right now.

I tried getting my network printer up and running with a friend's MacOS X box and it was nowhere near as easy as some Slashdotters make it seem. I had to know the location of the printer on my LAN (MacOS X did not search my LAN for acceptable printers, nor did it discover that this Brother HL1270N is the only printer on the LAN--two items ESR says would improve the GNOME druid he tried in Fedora Core 1) and I also had to know the make and model of the printer. Nothing was auto-discovered, nothing was automatically configured for me.

Conversely, adding the same printer to my GNU/Linux box was about as easy. No automatic configuration there either, but the GNOME druid guided me through the prompts ESR complained about. Yes, much of what ESR had to say was apropos--this process could be made far better along the lines he discussed, but I did not find MacOS X to be anywhere nearly as easy as even this topic's lead-in would suggest.

Adding my Epson inkjet color printer was a different situation. This job was easy when I connected the printer to the GNU/Linux box via the parallel port. My Fedora Core 1 box saw it, configured it on start up (I believe Kudzu did this and it appears to work), and I was left with a printer I could use right out of the box. So I don't completely understand where the "(Side note: parallel port? What year is it in the Raymond household?)" quip came from--some of the printers on LinuxPrinting.org state that autodetection works with the parallel port, not USB.

It was my experiences with printing under Fedora Core 1 that led me to recommend this distribution to friends (even making duplicate copies of my install discs to give them). So I'm left thinking that we're fortunate to have free software so the community can improve the software that needs improvement and we don't have to wait for someone or some organization to do it for us. I'd happily pay for improved free software if I couldn't do the job myself.

But they do support most of their printers. Their PCL and PostScript clone ones work perfectly with well documented PDLs.

See linuxprinting.org and their offically supported HP Linux Inkjet Driver Project. Unfortunately cost-cutting and outsourcing of some product development and resulting patent issues has made this less than perfect; but they are trying.

For as long as I can remember, ghostscript has supported Canon bubblejet printers with the bjc series of drivers. But hey, look at the table of linux-happy Canon printers yourself.

Obviously, the underlying technologies were very similar for these different OEM products. For purely marketing reasons, the products were made noncompatible. Engineers always resent this, but we need to realize that, like it or not, engineering is less a predictor of product success than marketing.

Disabling the keying features to allow your printer to use different ink cartridges is not very useful. You still must buy a new ink cartridge. Not much savings.

Refilling is theoretically a better way to save money, but it's problematic. Much as toner isn't just black dust, all inks are not created equal. Reliable inkjet printing is actually a surprisingly technical matter once you're past the consumer impression of "spray ink on a page" and you get down to the complex underlying chemistry and physics. The ink formulation is very important. I could go into tedious detail, but there probably isn't much general interest, and I do not want to take the chance of violating a nondisclosure agreement. Information that seems like common knowledge to an engineer is often considered a trade secret.

My conclusion is, you may or may not be able to drill and fill ink cartridges with some generic ink. The cheap ink refill kits are very likely to be a complete waste of time and money. The more expensive kits aren't really that much cheaper than the cartridges for the hassle involved, and they still may or may not work, and even when they work the print quality will suffer.

I've experimented with drilling and filling myself for my own very small scale use, with mixed results. You might reasonably expect to get one more use out of a filled cartridge on average, but the print quality will be worse because of unrecoverable clogged nozzles or burned out heaters. But keep in mind that I already knew a lot about the inner workings. YMMV.

A much better strategy to save money on ink cartridges is eBay. Don't buy the "remanufactured" cartridges. Those are just cartridges that someone else has drilled and filled, with about the same questionable results you could obtain for a lot less money. Instead, buy new cartridges in the manufacturer's sealed bags. They usually sell for less than half the price of online discount office supply stores. That makes them about the same price as the better refill kits, for a lot less hassle, and with a lot better print quality.

The fundamental issue here is, and always will be, marketing. It isn't just Lexmark. Our consumer habits force printer companies to sell printers at a loss and make up for this by inflating the price of supplies. The often used razor blade analogy is exactly correct. Companies are in business to make money. This is a good thing. You know the situation is screwed up when the price of an inkjet printer is consistently the same as the cost of the cartridges that ship with it. Of course, this does nothing to foster brand loyalty. When you can buy a printer with ink cartridges for the price of the replacement ink, that's what a lot of people do. Sadly, the printers go to the landfill as a monument to our consumption obsessed society. But I repeat, this problem is industry wide. It is not unique to Lexmark.

Low cost printing tips:

1) About half of Lexmark inkjets are Linux compatible. Check www.linuxprinting.org to see which work with Linux.

2) For volume printing, get a laser printer. Both color and mono lasers and toner are widely available on eBay. Printer prices start at about $40. Try to get a printer you can pick up locally, because shipping is usually $40-$80. All

Looks like I'll be paying extra for an HP Printer. :/

Ok, here's what I did to get my ML-4500 working right. I couldn't use Samsung's installer thingy, because the printer is attached to a server box, without X or other gui stuff needed by the configuration tool. Things didn't print right for me from clients using that tool, anyway, so I did the following on the (Linux) clients and it worked much better.

To print from Windows clients, all you need is cups on the server. The Samsung drivers work fine on Windows, you just have to add a port to print to the server (if you are doing this). I use Samba to share the printer. To set up Samba to do this, a simple entry in /etc/samba/smb.conf:

printcap name = lpstat
load printers = yes
printing = cups

My cups configuration in /etc/cups/printers.conf looks like this:

Info Samsung ML-4500
Location The Office
DeviceURI parallel:/dev/printers/0
State Idle
Accepting Yes
JobSheets none none
QuotaPeriod 0
PageLimit 0
KLimit 0

To print from the server box (using lpr), or from a Linux client, I took these steps (both on the server and clients):

• install ghostscript
• foomatic - be sure to configure it right!
• go to the linuxprinting.org site (LinuxPrinting.org) and use the PPD Generated to create the PPD file for the printer. Select the "cups" type for the PPD generator. Copy the generated PPD file to /usr/share/cups/model.
• Edit the PPD file, if necessary, and change the "PCFileName" entry from "gdi.ppd" to the correct ppd file name.

Next, enter the following commands (my printer is named "samsung" in the /etc/cups/printers.conf file:

lpadmin -d samsung
lpadmin -p samsung -m /usr/share/cups/model/samsung-ml-4500-gdi.ppd

Restart cupsd and print away.

What's so hard about that? You guys must be kidding about it being difficult.

I think its worse than ESR makes it out to be. CUPS is worse than useless. It looks like a printing system, but it is (in my experience) inscrutable and very, very unreliable.

I just threw away a printer, which in its lifetime probably printed 3x more postscript-as-text than actual rendered output, because CUPS is unreliable: try to print, get postscript gibberish, reboot, it keeps on printing gibberish, turn off printer, shut down cupsd, reboot, turn on printer, repeat 3ish times, and I'd occassionally get lucky and it would print non-gibberish for me. I expect that without this added wear, the printer would still work fine.

You might think I should consult the CUPS FAQ, but the CUPS FAQ is itself useless, doesn't answer any questions except "where to read cryptic documentation about printer internals" that you just don't give a shit about.

CUPS should be renamed CUTS: Common Unix Timewasting System.

Actually, if you check the Un*x printer compatibility database listing for HP, you will see that not all HP printers are so standards compliant. And they do use drivers, mostly standard ones like hpijs.
Granted, HP's site is not a good place to look for Linux HP printer drivers.

The current models, the HL-1440 and HL-1470N (built in ethernet) are great, use them at home and at the office (for low-volume stuff). The price is right, about $199 at any office store - $162 from newegg.

Linux Support Details in case you're interested!

Then check if the printer you have in mind is too slow (unlikely if it is a laser) or too fast.

Isn't faster better ?
Answer: Not always.

While it is simple to fuse toner to paper when printing 5-12 pages per minute, you'll need serious heat rollers for - let's say - 50 ppm. The whole engine needs lots more thought when paper speed is higher, all this adding to cost, size and weight. Energy-wise, a rather foolish thing to buy for home use. Besides, larger print endinges also have something like a lower limit for prints per month - expect trouble if you only print a couple of pages every few days with them...)
Finally, stay away from old printers. While they might still print nicely, they might produce loads of ozone due to old corona design. (Buying a cheap LED printer instead of a polygon motor based laser can help.)

One final remark - check the exact model of printer here, as something like a Frobozz 20X can work with Linux, while the Frobozz 20Xa is a paperweight...

I just bought a Brother HL-5040. linuxprinting.org gives it a "works perfectly" rating, it's fast, it's quiet, it has expandable memory using a standard SDRAM DIMM... The toner is cheaper than Samsung's if you use the extended capacity cartridges.

I searched for "OfficeMax coupons" on google and found a $30 off rebate deal + free shipping from a local store, and it cost me less than $200 after rebates. So far it's all good - just a satisifed customer, as they say.

Most people are willing to accept binary drivers as an alternative to no drivers.

I think that's why we need to teach more people about the ethics that started our community and keep the Free Software community going strong even in the face of SCO questioning the validity of the GNU General Public License (GPL) and Microsoft's CEOs going on speaking tours talking about how the GPL is a "cancer". I believe that people will choose to take a demonstrably ethical route to doing something when that route is also convenient. Similarly, in another vein, I think that as more people learn about Wal-Mart's employment practices and how they maintain low prices, more people realize that shopping there is sealing one's own fate.

To that end, if we had a hardware database that only listed hardware you could run entirely with Free Software, and if this database were very easy to use (even for novices), we could more easily steer people to companies that work with us. We have the beginnings of such a thing now: lists of video card chipsets that work with XFree86, scanners that work with SANE, printers that work with various Free Software drivers, but some of these are still too hard to use and they're not all found in one place. I'm not sure exactly how this new database would work, but I think one-stop-shopping is one of the highlights. I believe the Free Software Foundation wants to work on something like this, but they don't currently have the funding to do it. Perhaps someone with the hosting and space could work with them to get this going?

Linuxprinting.org has a vendor score card to show you which vendors deserve yor support.

Their recommendation (and HP's work writing opensource drivers that support all the features of their printers) was the reason that I purchased a PhotoSmart 7260 from HP and I haven't regretted it - even the integrated card reader works.

Not surprisingly they rate Lexmark inkjet printers as useless.

Linuxprinting.org has a vendor score card to show you which vendors deserve yor support.

Their recommendation (and HP's work writing opensource drivers that support all the features of their printers) was the reason that I purchased a PhotoSmart 7260 from HP and I haven't regretted it - even the integrated card reader works.

Not surprisingly they rate Lexmark inkjet printers as useless.

I'm a linux user, and rarely fire up a windows box, so this begs the question, are there good Linux drivers for Canon printers? I'm far from being an expert on inkjet printers, my lab owns a couple HP 990 inkjets which seem fine for the low volume color printing we do (for monochrome, we use laser jets), although ink is expensive, quality is fine for what we want. On a side note, I've noticed that LinuxPrinting.Org does not seem to give encouraging reports for Canon and Lexmark drivers.

NX has a few more goodies built-in:

• NX embodies the additional capabilities...
  • ...to connect to Windows Terminal Servers or Windows XP Professional boxes, using the RDP protocol,
  • ...and also to connect to VNC servers, using the RFB protocol.
  In these cases the remote NX proxy uses additional "agents" which speak the RDP or RFB protocols to the remote "foreign" servers. The NX agents translate these other protocols to X primitives, hand them to the remote NX proxy which transfers them down to the local NX client (applying, of course, its built-in compression and caching techniques). NX keeps bitmap updates in their foreign format and translates them into X bitmaps only at X server side, offering, thus, no penalties compared to the client speaking the native protocol. The NX encoding and compression of the resulting X protocol (using its usual algorithms) offer compression ratios ranging between 4:1 and 10:1 in respect to the native RDP or RFB protocol. NX derives its capabilites regarding these foreign protocols from "rdesktop" and "TightVNC" at the remote end, but uses an NX connection between the local and remote proxy.
• NX can share files and printers between the local NX client machine (running the X server) and the remote NX server running applications (that is the X clients)
• NX can tunnel multimedia and sound streams through the connection
• NX can encrypt all traffic using SSH
• NX can display not only remote "fullscreen" desktops, but even individual X applications in "single application window mode" on the local X server display (it makes for cute screenshots to put Konqueror or KMail on an MS Windows XP-based desktop this way)
• NX utilizes the achievements of other OSS developers by plugging their components into its architecture: X11, SSH, Samba, rsync, Xnest, rdesktop, TightVNC, artsd, ESD...
• NX servers don't install an additional daemon, opening an addtional port. NX clients connect to the standard SSH daemon of any given system (usually over port 22) and then start the "nxshell" (effectively starting the NX server and connecting to it). If an administrator cares for securing his SSH server, he implicitely has also cared to a large degree for securing his NX installation.

NX is the starting point for a new understanding of network desktop computing. It makes it possible to connect to your own Desktop, running your own application, using your own data from anywhere in the world even over slow connections like GSM-modems. Not too far from now, in the near future we will "NX-connect" on a peer-to-peer basis to remote applications that run on Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris and Windows application servers somewhere in the world, but are displayed at our local PDA. NX may soon define an X-based web, just like HTTP defined a HTML-based WWW.

Huh?

Bwuh?

Didn't look too hard, did you? That took three minutes with Google and the HP website. HP even link to the Sourceforge project themselves if you search for "psc 750 linux" on their site.

Whine whine whine, blah blah blah. Would you like someone to come wipe your ass for you too?

I realize that this is slightly off-topic, but it's still on the subject of Linux hardware support :). My HP 5L is on its last legs and I'm in the market for a new printer (nah, it's not he separator pad this time).

I've found LinuxPrinting.org and while it's a useful resource, it doesn't include all the printers I'm considering. For instance, while the HP section seems to be completely current, the Samsung section is missing a few.

I'm in the market for a 1200dpi b/w laser printer and some of the printers I'm considering at the moment are the LaserJet 1200se (or LaserJet 1300) from HP and the ML-1750 (or ML-1651) from Samsung. Of course, neither the ML-1750 nor the ML-1651 are listed on LinuxPrinting.org's Samsung page :-/.

Here's my rationale for each. The HP LaserJet 1200se is HP's cheapest laser that can do 1200dpi -- but I get the impression that it may have been discontinued and the 1300 may be easier to actually find. And, the ML-1750 is Samsung's cheapest 1200dpi laser, but it only gets "1200x600dpi", which I don't know whether that means it's has "real" 1200dpi support or not :-/. And, the ML-1651 is a bit more expensive than the ML-1750 but supports 1200x1200dpi.

Any suggestions?

I realize that this is slightly off-topic, but it's still on the subject of Linux hardware support :). My HP 5L is on its last legs and I'm in the market for a new printer (nah, it's not he separator pad this time).

I've found LinuxPrinting.org and while it's a useful resource, it doesn't include all the printers I'm considering. For instance, while the HP section seems to be completely current, the Samsung section is missing a few.

I'm in the market for a 1200dpi b/w laser printer and some of the printers I'm considering at the moment are the LaserJet 1200se (or LaserJet 1300) from HP and the ML-1750 (or ML-1651) from Samsung. Of course, neither the ML-1750 nor the ML-1651 are listed on LinuxPrinting.org's Samsung page :-/.

Here's my rationale for each. The HP LaserJet 1200se is HP's cheapest laser that can do 1200dpi -- but I get the impression that it may have been discontinued and the 1300 may be easier to actually find. And, the ML-1750 is Samsung's cheapest 1200dpi laser, but it only gets "1200x600dpi", which I don't know whether that means it's has "real" 1200dpi support or not :-/. And, the ML-1651 is a bit more expensive than the ML-1750 but supports 1200x1200dpi.

Any suggestions?

I realize that this is slightly off-topic, but it's still on the subject of Linux hardware support :). My HP 5L is on its last legs and I'm in the market for a new printer (nah, it's not he separator pad this time).

I've found LinuxPrinting.org and while it's a useful resource, it doesn't include all the printers I'm considering. For instance, while the HP section seems to be completely current, the Samsung section is missing a few.

I'm in the market for a 1200dpi b/w laser printer and some of the printers I'm considering at the moment are the LaserJet 1200se (or LaserJet 1300) from HP and the ML-1750 (or ML-1651) from Samsung. Of course, neither the ML-1750 nor the ML-1651 are listed on LinuxPrinting.org's Samsung page :-/.

Here's my rationale for each. The HP LaserJet 1200se is HP's cheapest laser that can do 1200dpi -- but I get the impression that it may have been discontinued and the 1300 may be easier to actually find. And, the ML-1750 is Samsung's cheapest 1200dpi laser, but it only gets "1200x600dpi", which I don't know whether that means it's has "real" 1200dpi support or not :-/. And, the ML-1651 is a bit more expensive than the ML-1750 but supports 1200x1200dpi.

Any suggestions?

I realize that this is slightly off-topic, but it's still on the subject of Linux hardware support :). My HP 5L is on its last legs and I'm in the market for a new printer (nah, it's not he separator pad this time).

I've found LinuxPrinting.org and while it's a useful resource, it doesn't include all the printers I'm considering. For instance, while the HP section seems to be completely current, the Samsung section is missing a few.

I'm in the market for a 1200dpi b/w laser printer and some of the printers I'm considering at the moment are the LaserJet 1200se (or LaserJet 1300) from HP and the ML-1750 (or ML-1651) from Samsung. Of course, neither the ML-1750 nor the ML-1651 are listed on LinuxPrinting.org's Samsung page :-/.

Here's my rationale for each. The HP LaserJet 1200se is HP's cheapest laser that can do 1200dpi -- but I get the impression that it may have been discontinued and the 1300 may be easier to actually find. And, the ML-1750 is Samsung's cheapest 1200dpi laser, but it only gets "1200x600dpi", which I don't know whether that means it's has "real" 1200dpi support or not :-/. And, the ML-1651 is a bit more expensive than the ML-1750 but supports 1200x1200dpi.

Any suggestions?

Looks like what this printer needs is someone to continue the already started coding project and reverse engineering effort; the orphaned project is archived at www.linuxprinting.org.

4.1 Does this printer work with free software?
http://www.linuxprinting.org/minolta-faq.html#q_4_ 1
No. This printer does not use ZjStream, which is a JBIG based language. It looks like an ESC based language with compression. Therefore, the foo2zjs driver will fail.

The compression is inferior to the 2300DL, however, it should not be difficult to create a driver. Good luck.

http://www.smallbusinesscomputing.com/testdrive/ar ticle.php/2202421
the W indicates that, like some low-cost monochrome lasers, it's a Windows-based (95, 98SE, Me, 2000, XP) printer, using the operating system's own interface instead of a Linux- and Mac-compatible language like PCL or PostScript.

--
Grant Taylor <gtaylor+slashdot_bigbg072203@picante.com>

--
Grant Taylor <gtaylor+slashdot_bigbg072203@picante.com>

The printer has parallel, USB, and 10/100 ethernet connections. I personally use the ethernet connection exclusively. It does 16 pages a minute in greyscale, and 4 pages per minute in color. While a lot of the more expensive color lasers can do single pass color printing and get 20+ ppm, 4 ppm for 8 x 10 color photos at top quality easily beats any inkjet. I printed my Christmas card (~100 copies x 2 pages full color) in under 2 hours. It used to take me days of printing with an inkjet.

My only issue with the Magicolor 2300DL is that it is not postscript. My primary desktop OS is Red Hat 9. Greyscale printing is perfect from linux. Color printing is not photo quality, as you can see patterning in the output. Linux printing is also slower than Windows. Linux printing does work well enough to be usable (it's the only printer set up on my linux boxen), but if you're going for true photo quality, for now, you'll need a windows PC lying around. Linux drivers can be found on linuxprinting.org jump directly to the 2300DL linuxprinting.org page or the driver page, which also gives info on the protocol used by the 2300DL.

As far as toner goes, I've had a hard time finding the high capacity 4500 page toner cartriges for everything but black. The standard 1500 page cartridges go for about $70, the large color ones for about $120, and the black ones (only comes as large) for about $80. The toner is a little more expensive than other lasers, but any laser toner is dirt cheap compared to ink.

The list price is $800, but you can probably pick it up for $600 if you can wait a little while for it to go on sale. It's definitely worth the extra $100 and the wait.

The printer has parallel, USB, and 10/100 ethernet connections. I personally use the ethernet connection exclusively. It does 16 pages a minute in greyscale, and 4 pages per minute in color. While a lot of the more expensive color lasers can do single pass color printing and get 20+ ppm, 4 ppm for 8 x 10 color photos at top quality easily beats any inkjet. I printed my Christmas card (~100 copies x 2 pages full color) in under 2 hours. It used to take me days of printing with an inkjet.

My only issue with the Magicolor 2300DL is that it is not postscript. My primary desktop OS is Red Hat 9. Greyscale printing is perfect from linux. Color printing is not photo quality, as you can see patterning in the output. Linux printing is also slower than Windows. Linux printing does work well enough to be usable (it's the only printer set up on my linux boxen), but if you're going for true photo quality, for now, you'll need a windows PC lying around. Linux drivers can be found on linuxprinting.org jump directly to the 2300DL linuxprinting.org page or the driver page, which also gives info on the protocol used by the 2300DL.

As far as toner goes, I've had a hard time finding the high capacity 4500 page toner cartriges for everything but black. The standard 1500 page cartridges go for about $70, the large color ones for about $120, and the black ones (only comes as large) for about $80. The toner is a little more expensive than other lasers, but any laser toner is dirt cheap compared to ink.

The list price is $800, but you can probably pick it up for $600 if you can wait a little while for it to go on sale. It's definitely worth the extra $100 and the wait.

I'd recommend an HP Color LaserJet like a 2500L, due to reliability I've experienced and excellent *nix support.
Most of HP's laserjets have great *nix support, and they're at the top of the scorecard over at linuxprinting.org... But there are some models to avoid, like the 1500L which uses a non-PS/PCL language and is essentially a doorstop outside of windows.

A color laserjet is going to be expensive up-front, but they cost less in the end. I've found that the toner lasts for years with typical home use. An old B&W laserjet lasted me nearly 6 years on one cartridge. I replaced it with a color laserjet, having never had to change the toner.
There's no cleaning print heads all the time (and wasting ink) if you go a few days without printing, and toner doesn't dry up. They print fast, and the ones I've used are quiet too.

I threw my Lexmark in the bin after the ink ran out when I found there were no Linux drivers for it except a partially working (B&W only)reverse engineered one. Nor do Lexmark seem to care much. See their scorecard here. "Useless"

They also claim that ignoring low ink warnings can double the life of ink cartridges. I wish I could ignore the warnings, as my Lexmark printer forbids me to print once 75% of ink is gone!

In particular, you can specify a filter to be used instead of the default postscript filter chain, and configure the queue to print to /dev/null. It will work the same way. The tricky bit is that CUPS defines queue attributes based on a PPD file, which is all well and good for your basic Postscript printer, but gets a little funky for non-ps printers. For "random" filtering, the key bit is the *cupsFilter: attribute, in which you may specify a filter to be run.

This is, incidentally, how Foomatic plugs itself into CUPS; foomatic is in LPD terms a monster general-purpose if= filter that serves mainly to bodge the drivers into the right place.

- Grant Taylor

LinuxPrinting.org rocks. Lots of good information with quality specifics for just about every printer that works with Linux. It has taken away much of the pain of printer configuration.

But is Canon evil in the sense of not revealing information needed to write open source device drivers for their inkjet printers? linuxprinting.org only grades Canon a C-.

It seems like it's hard these days to get your hands on a decent printer that doesn't need a new set of $50 ink cartriges every 300 pages or constantly clog, steak or jam. Added bonus if it has PostScript and expension capabilities without costing an arm and a leg. The new dispoable inkjets and GDI winprinters may occupy the best shelf space in the local office supply store, but there's still decent printers out there if you look around enough. You can bet I was a happy camper when I found a name brand 16ppm PostScript laser printer for under $200 at a local office supply store.

This week, the national office supply chain OfficeMax was advertising the HP LaserJet 1200SE for $199.99. Bad news, it was sold out. But good news is that another national retailer, Staples, has plenty in stock and will match the OfficeMax price if you bring a copy of OfficeMax's advertisement. In my area, it appeared in the Sunday Lowell Sun and the Sunday Boston Globe. Check your area newspaper for the advertisement. I'm sure there's other national office supply chains which can match the OfficeMax price on this printer. According to HP, regular price is $399.

The printer is 15ppm at 1600x1600dpi with PostScript and 16MB of RAM. (The non-SE model has only 8mb of RAM. On both models there is a quasi-standard looking RAM expansion slot which can accommodate another 64MB of memory). Connectivity is via your choice of a bi-directional parallel port with standard centronics connector and a USB "B" connector. Printer works flawlessly with CUPS over the parallel port.

Reports indicate it works fine over USB too. See linuxprinting.org for more information.

The printer includes one C7115A toner/drum cartridge, which yields around 2500 pages. I found new prefilled cartridges for $60. Loose refill toner is $13. I found ferrous toner (for MICR printing on checks and so on) for $35.