[OT] Selling Some Computer Stuff on E-Bay

D. Hugh Redelmeier hugh-pmF8o41NoarQT0dZR+AlfA at public.gmane.org
Wed Mar 15 21:50:50 UTC 2006


| From: Lennart Sorensen <lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org>

| Well my experience with Brother printers is that some claim HP laserjet
| such and such compatibility, but if you try and use them as such you
| discover the margins are different so your edges get cut off, and other
| stupidities.  To me Brother == Junk.

I often buy Brother laser printers.  That in itself should be a
warning -- why do I have to replace them?  Let me explain.

Traditionally, Brother's have separate drums and toner cartridges.
The toner has been quite cheap.  The drums cost more than the printers
(there are sales on printers but not drums and I always buy at sales).
So when the drum wears out, ditch the printer.  The resulting cost per
page seems to be good.

I've noticed that recent Brother cartridges are more expensive.  I
don't know if they now include the drum.

The low end Brothers often cost about $100.

We have Brother HL-1435 printers for my father, my wife, and my two
children (1 each -- in different households).  We've "used up"
two or three older models (they supported PCL).

| I suspect some newer brothers are doing similar things to some canon and
| others, making GDI printers, which are ram on a usb interface and a
| command interface to dump the page in ram to the drum.

Cheap Brothers have something GDI-like.  The most recent ones that
I've bought are supported by CUPS out of the box.  Unfortunately the
linuxprinting database isn't correct for my model (HL 1435).
See the comments I added 2.5 years ago:
  http://www.linuxprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=Brother-HL-1435
I wonder how to get this entry properly updated.

I don't know if current Brothers are supported.  Perhaps this is
accurate (for entries other than HL-1435):
  http://www.linuxprinting.org/printer_list.cgi?make=Brother

MFP devices seem to be much more problematic under Linux.  I've not
looked into why.  My guess is that they don't present themselves as
multiple distinct devices but as some sort of chimera requiring a
single (custom) driver for all parts.
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