[TriLUG] Best printer?

[matt at noway2.thruhere.net]

> A few months ago I was in the same situation (old HP with expensive
> cartridges), and a good friend of mine recommended the "Canon MFC8380Cdw"
> printer.  I purchased it from PCRush for about $380 (cheaper today at
> $360) and received it in just a couple of days.
>
> After using it for a while, I must agree this is a very good printer.  It
> is a color printer with fax/scan/wifi capabilities, and it prints
> fantastic.  Best of all, the replacement cartridges are very inexpensive
> compared to the HP stuff.  I am able to scan using the flatbed and scanner
> feeder directly to an SMB storage area on my linux machine.
>
One thing that I would suggest you do, after you think you know what you
want and before you purchase, is go to the 'add printer' through CUPS or
whatever system your using and verify that the make and model come up
listed.

I have an HP that (supposedly) has Linux drivers via the HPLIP, but is a
model that is not listed in drop down list.  This makes finding a .PPD for
the printer a royal pain.

I will also say that there seems to be a lot of variation in how well a
printer works and how easy it is to connect amongst the distributions. 
This same printer was a massive headache trying to get it to connect via
the wireless network on Ubuntu, but was a snap under Slackware.  Then just
yesterday, I spent ~6.0 hours trying to get the damned thing to work under
Arch.  It worked flawlessly when connected via USB but gave me nothing but
trouble as a network printer.

Ultimately the solution was a combination of running the hp-setup utility
under KDESU (since root = !GUI) to get the correct PPD filter and
discovering that the AVAHI daemon wasn't running, which is necessary if
you use DHCP and identify the printer by name.

Hopefully by picking a standard supported printer you can reduce the
likelihood of such issues.