[plug] printers (yet again)

[Bernd Felsche]

craig at postnewspapers.com.au (Craig Ringer) writes:
>On Thu, Dec 08, 2005 at 02:43:14PM +0800, Kev wrote:

>> I'm looking (yet again!) at colour laser printers, with a view to buying 
>> one for our small LAN at home.  One which takes my fancy is the Samsung 
>> CLP-550N.  In the blurb about this printer it says, under the heading,

>Ah, you didn't say it was a network printer, though it sounded likely
>from your description.

>I'm yet to see a network laser printer without a real built-in
>PostScript RIP (and thus, almost inevitably, decent cross-platform
>support).

Nothing surprises me in what half-baked products some vendors will
try to flog.

>It's always worth linking to the product info page. While not the
>vendor's, I looked at this one as I was curious to see how it compared
>to the Xerox Phaser 4500.

>http://www.i-tech.com.au/products/1231_Samsung_CLP_550N_Network_Colour_Laser.asp

>Answer: it's OK, and insanely cheap (especially compared to the Xerox).
>I'd want to check consumable prices very carefully, though, and make
>sure it has decent quality results, is reliable, and is decently built.
>That's a REALLY cheap printer (for a network laser with built-in RIP),
>and there might be a reason for it.

Perhaps it's running Linux with Ghostscript. :-)

As for consumables, the initial toner cartridge may have as little
as a a third of the capacity of a "proper" cartridge.

Depending on how much colour you put on a sheet of paper, I've seen
the real cost of printing being as high as $6/page!

That's largely due to the "5% coverage" that's assumed for rated
cartridge capacity; and the fact that many won't do much more than
that when they get below about a third full; making the cartridge
useless for fancy colour pages with large area fills.

Unless you're printing pictures of penguins or polar bears in their
home environment, you'd never reach the rated cartridge capacity
printing photo-like.
-- 
/"\ Bernd Felsche - Innovative Reckoning, Perth, Western Australia
\ /  ASCII ribbon campaign | Economist	\E*con"o*mist\, n.
 X   against HTML mail     | One with a ready explanation as to why
/ \  and postings          | his last prediction was so wrong