Anyone used the Canon iP3300 or the Canon iP1800 printers?

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Fri, Aug 17, 2007 at 12:36:17PM -0400, Kevin Cozens wrote:
> I'm currently looking at which printers I can use as part of a project for 
> a client. I'm looking mainly at ink jet printers. The catch is that I'm 
> using an ARM based board running Linux and have very little free flash 
> memory (< 12M) after installing the application, the Ghostscript 8.60 
> executable, and one font file.
> 
> Based on information from the Linux Printing Database the Canon PIXMA 
> iP3300 should work using the bjc800 driver. The Canon PIXMA iP1800 should 
> also work under Linux but the Linux drivers from Canon are mainly for use 
> with a CUPS based printing system.
> 
> The application generates a Postscript file which is fed to Ghostscript 
> which then talks to the printer over a USB port. Has anyone used either of 
> these two printers? Is the iP1800 another printer that can be made to 
> (partially?) work with the bjc800 driver?
> 
> Only a single page will be output in black and white three to four times a 
> day. It won't matter if the full features of the printer are not supported 
> by an older, but compatible, driver.

What kind of budget is available for it?  Obviously the simplest
solution is to get an actual postscript printer instead (will also be
way faster that way).  You can get nice colour laser printers from
xerox that do postscript for about $500, and they cost way less to use
than an inkjet, and you don't have to worry about cleaning cycles
either.  Anything that should be reliable with little maintenance has to
avoid inkjets.  The Xerox 6120/N can be had for $399 after rebate at
the moment and has parallel, usb2 and 10/100 ethernet connections.

As for drivers for inkjets, some unfortunately use binary blobs in some
cases, which tends to make them x86 cpu only.  Others do work with plain
ghostscript or gutenprint, in which case the only issue is how much cpu
load it will take to drive it.

Oh and ghostscript and buddies take a LOT of ram to render a single
page.  I would actually be surprised if most arm based systems have
enough ram and tmp space to run a postscript renderer.

--
Len Sorensen
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