Inkjet printer for Linux suggestion, please.

  • Thread starter Thread starter GP
  • Start date Start date
What makes PCL printers more expensive?
Click to expand...

They need more RAM and processing power on board than host based.
Are the rights paid to Adobe on Postcript that high?
Click to expand...

Apparently; which is why HP does PostScript *emulation" now -- all its
"PS compatible" printers use cloned PS interpreters, not Adobe ones.
As I said in a previous post, my Canon BJ-300 used a "driver natively
supported by ghostscript". All I had to do, either in Apsfilter (Slackware) or
CUPS (Knoppix), is choose the driver in a list. Wouldn't it be possible to do
the same with a laser printer?
Click to expand...

Mostly, except for the very cheapest (Winprinter) models.

Just check out printer models by looking at their specs (if they
support PS or PCL, no problem with Linux), and see what
<http://www.linuxprinting.org/> says about them.
 
Warren Block wrote:

According to APSFILTER, the situation is more complicated. The 3 first choices
are:

1) PostScript printer (generic)
2) PostScript printer (with ghostscript drivers)
3) printer driver natively supported by ghostscript

So, accordning to choice 2, you can have a PostScript printer with ghostscript
drivers.
Click to expand...

Well, yes, but this is basically augmenting the postscript, by
embedding fonts, for instance. You can still print PS without this,
just without some features supplied by the software.
Also, I was quite surprised to find that some inkjet printers, such as my
Canon BJ-300 were "natively supported by ghostscript".
Click to expand...

"Native support" means that the language of the printer is well-enough
documented that someone has been able to write a GS driver for it,
thus translating PS to its language, The other way GS works is
(especially under Windows) to use the driver supplied by the
manufacturer, and feed data to that. So many Winprinters can be made
to work with GS under Windows by this method, but not on other
platforms.
Do you have a link where I can learn more?
Click to expand...

There is a lot of info about PostScript on the web. Start at Adobe.com
and the Ghostscript home page. It's favoured because it's powerful,
and well-documented, and is easily manipulated to preprocess and
analyse files before output.
 
I don't htink I would buy a used printer. I remember one of those HL Laserjet
4 at school printing about 1,000 pages a day, pretty much every day of the
year. Let's round up to 300,000 pages a year. That's a lot of printing!

It's hard to know what you get when you buy used.
Click to expand...

I'd assume if it's printed 300,000 pages and is demonstrably still
working that it'll probably last indefinitely. These are
well-understood and supported, if anything does wear out it's easy to
get parts. They were designed to be workgroup printers, so running
them single user is just idling.

Coincidentally, I bought an LJ4 with 300k on the clock early this year
and I'm very happy with it.
 
They need more RAM and processing power on board than host based.
Click to expand...

Still, it seems some printers, e.g. the Lexmark E232, are host-based but offer
PCL.

See:
http://www.eurobild.ro/pdf/E232_RO.pdf

This page also says that the Postscript 3 provided is only for Mac OS X ?
Apparently; which is why HP does PostScript *emulation" now -- all its
"PS compatible" printers use cloned PS interpreters, not Adobe ones.
Click to expand...
Mostly, except for the very cheapest (Winprinter) models.
Click to expand...

Do you really mean that all printers except Winprinters can be used with
ghostscript?
Just check out printer models by looking at their specs (if they
support PS or PCL, no problem with Linux), and see what
<http://www.linuxprinting.org/> says about them.
Click to expand...

The laser printers I'm considering now at Staples:

Laserjet 1012:

http://linuxprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=HP-LaserJet_1012

Reports are rather iffy:

«Sometimes it happens that the printer stops working and reports the error
"Unsupported Personality: PCL".» On the HP forum, an HP representative says
it's better not to count on HP fixing the problem.

Lexmark E232:

Not listed. Lexmark says they only support Red Hat and Suse. I don't and won't
use either.

Samsung ML-1740:

Not listed. Supposed to work with any Linux you can throw at it with some
Samsung proprietary language.

------------

Considering I want a cheap, new, easy to install printer with Slackware/Debian
and even 5 ppm would be OK, what would you suggest I go for?

GP
 
I didn't see the beginning of this thread, but both of my HP printers (HP
deskjet 6122 and HP photosmart 375B) work fine with Linux (Fedora core 2).
Note, Fedora doesn't yet list the 375B, but if I call it a 240, it works fine.
 
NJ said:
The Brother HL-1440 is supposed to work well in Linux. :)
Click to expand...

It does work well. It's PCL emulation, and the memory is
small (2 mbytes), but that's good enough for 600x600 resolution.

Others here have mentioned wanting postscript etc., but with CUPS
it's not a concern.

HL-1440's were $99 at Staples yesterday. I brought it home, hooked
it up to a RH9 system with a parallel cable, used the GUI to configure
it, and like 30 seconds later was succesfully printing.

It might be harder if you need to use USB, I do not know if PCL
emulation works over USB, and there's a warning to not plug in the
USB cable until you've installed the Windows drivers or else you'll
screw up the printer.

Tim.
 
Back
Top