Linux Printing: Still Awful After All These Years

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 06:04:29PM -0400, John Myshrall wrote:
> I personally like the Samsung units. I took a ML2010 and a Netgear PS 
> 121 printserver and made a networked printer. total cost $ 120.00 but 
> that was 2 years ago. It is only for home office use and well kids home 
> work though.
> 
> Len I'm curious about what your take is on them.

They appear like junk to me.  I looked at them, but found the driver
support for linux appeared to be a bit of a mess, and I hate wasting my
cpu cycles rendering for a printer (my athlon 700 was hopeless running
an epson inkjet, so I moved the printer server job to the mythtv box
with the quad 2.4ghz).  I seem to recall the toner cost appeared rather
high as well when I considered one of those printers a couple of years
ago.  It looked like a bargain to get a laser printer for that price,
but after a bit of research I wasn't interested at all anymore.  If I
want a fast laser printer I would rather spend $450 on xomething
like the xerox 6130 which is a colour laser printer, with postscript 3
and PCL6 built in.  You will never have driver issues with a postscript
printer, and you won't waste any cpu cycles on rendering since it has
its own 333MHz CPU for the job and it has a network port built in so you
don't need a seperate print server.  The 6125 is host based and hence
about $100 less, but that just gives you all the driver issues and
inefficiencies back.  I just don't print very much at home so I just
stick with the cheap little epson inkjet which works quite well.

I have only owned a few Samsung devices, and I have come to hate
everyone of them.  Two cell phones (lovely UI, terrible mechanical
quality), DVD player (crashes playing many Fox releases, and it isn't
just mine, a few other people I know with Samsung players have seen the
exact same problem), as well as monitors at work (worst CRTs I have ever
worked with).  As a result the name Samsung automatically implies junk.
I simply haven't met a good (never mind great) Samsung product yet.

-- 
Len Sorensen
--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://gtalug.org/
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://gtalug.org/wiki/Mailing_lists