[plug] Printer advice

[Cameron Patrick]

Kev wrote:

> Some advice please, but not a war.
> 
> Do any of you have any words of wisdom wrt colour laser printers, below 
> $1,000 and close enough to PnP with Linux?  I really like the look of 
> the Samsung CLP-550N Network Colour Laser Printer with standard 
> auto-duplexing.

We have a Brother HL-2700CN at home.  It cost $900 from Officeworks.
It has built-in ethernet, speaks your choice of Postscript or PCL, and
of course works "out of the box".  The colour printing quality is only
so-so: fine for coloured text or graphs, but not something I'd want to
run off lots of photos on.  It's very fast at black and white printing
(they claim 30 pages per minute; it wouldn't surprise me if it
actually achieved 20 ppm on a long document) and reasonably fast for
colour (presumably 4 times slower since the page has to be run through
the guts of the printer once for each colour).

Brother officially only support Windows and Mac OS X on this printer,
but since it speaks postscript you don't need any special drivers.
You can either use the HL-2600CN driver which comes with CUPS or snag
the PPD that's part of the Mac driver kit to get some extra options.
(It appears that you need a Mac to extract the driver; I have placed a
copy at http://cp.yi.org/cameron/Brother-HL-2700CN.ppd in case anyone
else on the list might want, and for the people who find this post
through Google.)

I'd look for something with built-in ethernet that speaks Postscript
to ease the pain of finding decent drivers for it (on any platform!).

We have a Minolta "Magicolour" of some sort at work (not in the
below-$1000 range).  It has its own proprietary language and the Linux
drivers for it are a little quaint.  The Windows ones aren't much
better - it's a networked printer but the drivers only give you the
option of installing for a parallel or USB printer.  I'd stay away
from this one.  Produces nice (inkjet-quality) photos though.

> I've heard that HP always have good drivers available for them, but
> the printers seem to cost more and the specs seem to be a little
> depleated.

They're improving on that score.  We looked at a low-end HP which
was similarly priced and features to the Brother but ended up avoiding
it because they used "chipped" toner cartridges which count the number
of pages they've been used for and refuse to print more than X number
of pages, no matter how much toner is actually left in them - the kind
of disgusting practices I thought we'd left behind when moving from an
inkjet to a laser printer :-(

Cameron.