[TriLUG] Best printer?

[William Sutton]

and here I'm happily sitting on an HP LaserJet 4100N.  No muss, no fuss, 
but no scan or color, either.  I got it for $1300 back in 2000 because I 
didn't want to fuss with shared printers under CUPS.  Since then, I've 
replaced the motherboard and JetDirect card ($500-ish).  It still has 99% 
of its toner left, so at this rate, my grandchildren will be using it 
(assumuing ethernet still exists).

William Sutton

On Mon, 25 Mar 2013, matt at noway2.thruhere.net wrote:

>> 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.
>
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