[buug] Color laser printer compatibility

Rick Moen rick at linuxmafia.com
Tue May 12 10:15:17 PDT 2009


Quoting Zeke Krahlin (pewterbot9 at gmail.com):

> Per Rick Moen's sage advice to steer clear of *all* inkjet printers,
> and in need of acquiring a good quality color printer, I've started
> looking at the laser species. 

FWIW, I've traditionally known _colour_ laser printers as an exotic and
somewhat pricey subspecies that I've fortunately not needed, so I've not
paid close attention to them.  I gather that their prices have dropped
immensely while I wasn't looking.  But, in consequence, I'm not up to
date on the state of them.

Honestly, I've always assumed that limited amounts of colour printing is
the best possible usage model for an inkjet:  That is, the post-purchase
variable costs of an inkjet -- pretty much any inkjet -- tend to suck,
but, if you use them only when absolutely necessary and stick to a
dependable monotone laser for everyday, you pay ghastly per-page charges
only for a small number of pages per year, and thus win.

For many years, until some time around 2006-2007, a gentleman named
Grant Taylor ran the linuxprinting.org Web site, and one of its many
nice features was its Suggested Printers page.  What changed in '06-'07 
is that Grant turned over operation of the site and its extensive
database on printer makes/models to The Linux Foundation.  Those guys
have done a decent job, but Suggested Printers is among the features now
dropped from the site (which itself moved to openprinting.org).

Here's the final snapshot of that page at archive.org:

http://web.archive.org/web/20071229130553/www.linux-foundation.org/en/OpenPrinting/Database/SuggestedPrinters

It was already, then, a long-unmaintained page.  I'd guesstimate that
its contents were truly current only as of maybe 2005.

So, FWIW, Grant was _then_ able to announce that the price problem with
colour lasers had recently been broken, such that "There are already
many devices well under $1000."

Grant was able to enthusiastically recommend models based on nothing but
commodity PostScript as the printer language, such as the HP Color
LaserJet 2550L and Minolta Magicolor 2450.  He suggests that other
PostScript models were also hitting the market.  He also recommended with
almost as much enthusiasm the Konica or Minolta QMS Magicolor DL series,
which required one-off drivers that were, however, open source.  

On the slightly higher end, he added "Workgroup and high-end color laser
printers usually understand PostScript and so they can easily be set up
with the manufacturer-supplied PPD file."

So, where does that leave you in 2009?  I'm not sure -- but I'd
certainly concentrate on finding genuine PostScript-compatible printers,
among what's listed in the "openprinting.org" database, and then
evaluate _those_ for durability and price.

I honestly have no idea if you can't get anything but proprietary crap
for a mere $150.  However, when you do your Web site research, you'll know. 


> "Minimum system requirements: SuSE Linux 8.2, Red Hat Linux 9, Red Hat
> Fedora Core 1, Mandrake Linux 10.1 Discovery, SuSE Linux 9.2, Red Hat
> Fedora Core 3, Red Hat Linux 8.0." [I removed any Windoze and Mac
> listings, for brevity's sake.]

Aw, c'mon.  This is not a distro-specific problem.  Any given release of
a distro comes provided with then-recent sets of various printer filter
("driver") packages:  Ghostscript Uniprint, Magicfilter, lots
of others.  If your distro doesn't have a recent enough driver of the
deseired family for a given printer, most of the time you can just grab
a PPD for the printer, e.g., via Linux Foundation's warmed-over version
of Grant's site, just drop it onto your filesystem, and point CUPS at
it.  Done.`




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