Linux Printing: Still Awful After All These Years

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Wed, Mar 26, 2008 at 03:19:49PM -0400, phiscock-g851W1bGYuGnS0EtXVNi6w at public.gmane.org wrote:
> My experience with Samsung printers has been quite positive. I have a
> ML-2250 monochrome laser printer and a friend has a similar colour
> version. The print quality is fine and the cartridge that came with the
> thing lasted what seemed to be *for ever*, something like 2 years under
> light use. I just replaced the toner cartridge for about $120. Paper
> feeding is reliable, it almost never jams. The colour quality is fine for
> our purpose, which is commercial brochures.

Well my father uses a xerox 6300N and tends to print about 25000 pages
in a year.  I don't believe he has ever had a page jam on it yet.  Toner
that runs about 8000 pages is $78.

> Just after I bought this one it quit and Samsung replaced it immediately
> and without fuss. So there is support in Toronto.
> 
> As Lennart says, the Linux drivers are hopeless but it works fine when
> spoofed as a laserjet.
> 
> I can see that there is some attraction in having postscript built in, but
> for this printer it's an expensive option. Having the postscript driver in
> software does allow updates. And at the speed of modern PCs there's not
> much incentive to offload the processing.

Not all machines are fast.  And why would you ever want to add more load
for your CPU to do.  I don't buy a fast CPU just so some cheapskate
printer company can waste my CPU cycles doing what a $5 CPU could have
done in the printer faster and using less power.

Upgrading the firmware on the xerox printers is not difficult, although
there never seems to be any reason to (I haven't seen very many updates
for any of their printers).

> So there are pros and cons to these printers, but I wouldn't call them junk.
> The vertically feeding HP laser that I had before this, that was the
> subject of a class-action suit because its paper handling was so terrible,
> now *that* was junk. I keep seeing them in the trash on garbage day.

The laserjet 4L (and similar) were junk.  And yet people still
automatically assume HP printers are amazing.  Many laserjet printers
worked great, some were practically indestructible (IIIP for example).
Their postscript support has never been great though.  It usually works,
but it is amazingly slow.  When xerox does postscript, it's fast (much
faster than you could render it using your host CPU in most cases).

-- 
Len Sorensen
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