[TriLUG] Best printer?

[David Burton]

My HP LasjerJet 4 w/ Postscript card (basically a 4M w/o the AppleTalk
adapter), is now old enough to vote.  I've repaired it twice (replaced some
feed rollers, and I've now forgotten the other problem).  I think I also
upgraded the RAM in it at some point.

Dave


On Mon, Mar 25, 2013 at 9:49 AM, William Sutton <william at trilug.org> wrote:

> 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.
>>
>