What is a Good Printer for Linux?

mystik asks: "What would be a good printer for my linux system? I bought an HP712C for a great price, but was disappointed to find out that HP made the Protocol propriatary, and unanable to work without some siginificant hacking of my linux system. Hopefully I can get some good printers cheap... " Well, this is a rather broad question. It would help if folks would recommend several different printers covering as many of the printer classes (ie dot-matrix, bubble-jet, ink-jet, and lasers) as you can.

Comments

Postscript laser printers are good

[dutky]

I use a couple of old Apple Laserwriter IIs at home. They can be had pretty cheaply these days, most versions have a serial port that will work with PCs, and one version (IIg) even has an ethernet port and allows you to connect using lpr protocol.

Otherwise, you should be able to find some HP laserprinters at reasonable prices, though network support will probably cost you extra. In the linux world PCL is about as well supported as postscript, so you won't be losing too much.

The really good thing about these older laser printers is that they are built like tanks, turn out pages at fairly high rates (8ppm is common) and under normal home or student use they run forever on a single toner cartridge.

Re:Postscript laser printers are good

[SoftwareJanitor]

I also have an HP LJ III which I picked up for $50. The going price for them these days seems to be about $100 or so. I got mine cheap because the person who had it had a mishap that caused a large amount of toner to be spilled inside, but after some careful cleaning it now works fine. Supplies as noted are cheap (unlike an inkjet, it prints good on even the cheapest copier bond). Refilled toner cartridges can save you serious money, but even new cartridges are cheap compared to inkjet when you consider a $50-$80 cartridge will print 3000-4000 pages compared to a lot of inkjets with $20-$30 cartridges that print 500-700 pages.

One recommendation is to add additional memory to improve performance. The LJ III's only come with a small amount of memory, and adding more really helps.

PRINTERS 4 LINUX

[AXIOM13]

Like above any postscript printer is a sure bet, but they don't come cheap. I personally have an Epson Stylus 800 and it works great. Most linux distros have the proper filters for this printer and support up to 1400 X 720 dpi for it. Not to mention it's pretty cheep, about $300 CDN.

HP Deskjet

[severett]

I've had good results with an HP Deskjet 692C.

I use ghostscript to print anything "pretty" using cdj550 as my printer type.

Shawn

Try this first...

[JTFritz]

Have you checked out a filtering application for your HP printer. I have a HP 820Cxi that I have working with Linux.

Try this filtering program listed on Freshmeat called ifhp.

Just trying to help you save some cash!

There's a Linux printer guide

[A nonymous Coward]

...but unfortunately I'm at work now and the URL is at home. It lists printers which are supported by Linux, primarily via Ghostscript IIRC.

I'm sending email home to remember to post a followup to this. Check back after midnight GMT.

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Re:There's a Linux printer guide

[spinkham]

http://www.picante.com/~gtaylor/pht/printer_list.c gi

There it is..

Low-cost PS lasers

[Niglet]

There's a number of fairly inexpensive Postscript Laser printers around. If you're happy with black and white, don't care that the print quality isn't *quite* as high as a LaserJet, do care about the environment, and/or want to print lots of stuff fast, then look at the Kyocera range -- and before you buy anyone else's, work out how much extra it'll cost you in consumables over its life. The FS-3750 is blisteringly fast and will run for 400K pages on nothing but a few toner refills, at a small fraction of the cost per page of any other make. KPDL2 is a Postscript-clone rather than Adobe, but I've not had any problems. FS-1750 is the same with a cheaper, slower processor. The FS-800 isn't quite so fast or so cheap to run, but is a lot cheaper to buy and shares the permanent-everything technology and KPDL2. Any of these are great for anyone who wants to "use the source". If you don't care about PS, the entry model does Laserjet emulation only and is still cheaper - again with the very low consumables cost. If you do care about PS, the cheapest PS printer I know of is a Lexmark - again I've no experince thereof. I wouldn't recommend an inkjet as an only printer to anyone who intends to be printing manuals and source listings - I'm sure the manufacturers sell the printers at or below cost and make money hand over fist on the ink. Of course, if you want colour...

There is a linux driver, and it works well...

[killbill]

A linux driver for the hp 7xx and some 8xx series win-printers exists and works well, although it currently supports black and white printout only.

It is easy to install, and works with Ghostscript, so the printer looks like a postscript device.

I have had no problems with it, and installation is pretty straghtforward (instructions are on the above site).

I don't blame HP so much for creating the whole winprinter concept (which after all is not much different then PCL). It makes sense, as current host CPU's are SO powerfull. I don't want to pay for another CPU and more RAM for my printer... I already have that in my PC. Go ahead and make the printer dumb and cheap.

I do blame HP for not opening up the interface specifications, however. It is silly to make people reverse engineer everything to get these (otherwise quite nice) printers supported on other operating systems.

I, for one, would not have bought my 720 had I not known already that it was supported via the above linked product.

That being said, it is a great little printer for black and white output under Linux, and coupled with good plastic coated Kodak inkjet paper, can produce some stunningly high quality photographs under Windows. It's a lot of bang for the buck.

Bill Kilgallon

Lexmark Optra 40

[misterklaw]

If you want/need color, i would recommend the Lexmark Optra 40/45 (or whatever the newer one is). It's a color postscript inkjet, comes with 4MB of ram (and has a simm slot for up to 32 more MB), and is pretty fast. I got the Optra 40 from onsale last summer for $230, and i love it. They even provide (from their site) linux/unix utilities to perform functions (like changing cartridges, cleaning heads, alignment, etc). Plus on the warranty registration card there was a box to check if you want the technical reference manual... and they send you one for free! You can press one of the buttons and it prints out a page with the current ink level in each tank, plus all the configuration information. I have been quite happy with it, except for the fact the the black ink smears, but they have supposedly fixed that. Cartridges are everywhere, and because its PS its easier than H to set up.

Lexmark Optra E310

[jlaporte]

In the laser category, I would recommend the Lexmark Optra E310. It's the best priced PS laser printer I have found. I got one a few months ago, and the output is very nice. Postscript level 2 comes standard as well as PCL 6, 5e. 600dpi, 8ppm, 2MB standard, expandable to 66MB. USB and parallel, with ethernet add-on available I believe. Got mine for about $450CDN.

Re:Lexmark Optra E310

[Tet]

I would recommend the Lexmark Optra E310.

I've been seriously considering one of these, having found a source of them at a very good price. I have a few concerns though. Firstly, what's the print quality like? I'm not after anything spectacular, but I'm always a bit wary of "low-end" tech. Secondly, is the standard 2MB enough, or should I look at getting more? My current printer has 512K which is definitely not enough for some of the image-based stuff I print. Also, what does it do on a PostScript error? My current printer (a QMS 410-PS) just stops, and awaits a new job. The ones at work print out the PostScript error, so you can see what's gone wrong. Obviously, I'd prefer the latter...

A while back I would've said PS, but...

[jfunk]

There's an incredibly nice package called apsfilter. It's really nice and SuSE will configure it through YaST. Imagine 'lpr foo.pdf' or 'lpr bar.jpg' and it starts to look quite nice.

I have an Epson Stylus Color 600. I have it set to 720x720 dpi (you can go up to 1440). Print quality is fantastic. I've printed transparencies for positive PCB making on LaserJets at work which completely sucked. Dark areas faded in the middle, it was really spotty. It was unacceptable for what I was doing. I sent the files home and printed them on my el-cheapo Epson. The images were perfect. The boards actually looked professional. Not even any breaks on the very thin lines. I've found the quality better than the DeskJets I've tried, as well.

Despite what many people have told me, It's incredibly reliable. I've never had a paper jam, it's never pulled two pages through as one, and it takes very little space on top of my print server, a mini-tower. Tech support is very good, too.

Basically, Epson gives you quite the bang for your buck. I've had no problems with it in Linux.

Re:A while back I would've said PS, but...

[Matts]

But sadly the control and output from Ghostscript is crap. Compare it to a printout from Windows on the same printer printing the same thing and you'll see what I mean. Colour gradients are just awful in ghostscript (even using the universal driver - which is better but not perfect).

Yep that's it! Thanks, spinkham

[A nonymous Coward]

So I guess I won't post it again!

Very nice printer guide.

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