[GTALUG] surprisingly okay laser printer on special at Canada Computers: Brother DCP-L2550DW

[Stewart C. Russell]

It's rather sad that Linux users are back to scratching around to find
compatible printers. For a few years, almost everything just worked. Now
we're deeply into the Gillette model of sales: make money on
consumables, but sell the main hardware cheap. It's not helped that the
Apple-owned CUPS printing system — though completely open — is absurdly
complex and makes diagnosing print problems very hard.

Our old Brother network laser printer having become mysteriously slow
(first page times in the 10s of minutes) and producing horrible output,
it was time for a new one. A little digging turned up this:

https://www.canadacomputers.com/product_info.php?cPath=34_1170_454&item_id=119555

for $140. It's not marked as a special, but other vendors sell it for
around $240.

It's a full PCL/PostScript (well, BR-Script) network printer with a
simple ADF scanner on top. Since it's an IPP printer, it can usually be
auto-discovered on the network. With the right generic driver
(cups-ipp-utils on Debian) it'll print properly on any architecture of
Linux: my Raspberry Pis are perfectly happy with it. It's IPv6 aware
too, if that matters to you.

The product page gives you access to "full featured" Linux drivers,
including one for the scanner:

https://support.brother.com/g/b/producttop.aspx?c=ca&lang=en&prod=dcpl2550dw_us

Unfortunately, these drivers are x86 only (and one's not even x86_64).

The scanner driver is *utterly* dismal. While I was quite pleased it
could scan directly (via a brscan system service) over wireless to my
computer, all it could do is dump the first page as a very low
resolution Legal-sized B&W scan to a PNM file in ~/brscan. Worse still,
the file and folder were owned by root. Everything but the first page in
the ADF is ignored (but ejected from the ADF, dammit). Thankfully, the
processes are managed through shell scripts stored in /opt. These
scripts are appalling badly written. There's a script for each of the
scanner's Scan to Image/Document/Email/OCR functions, but most of them
don't work as shipped. The OCR one has a whole section of
might-have-worked-once code commented out and doesn't seem to generate
any output at all.

Despite their flimsy feel, Brother printers are fairly robust. Nait
Singh* warns that some of the newer (cheaper) Brother printers use
different control engines even in the same printer model, and that very
new Brother printers have 'chipped' printer cartridges that need a
little work to circumvent. Nait's been refurbishing, refilling and
selling printers for years and is quite careful to suggest the lowest
TCO printer to buyers. He still recommends Brother laser printers over
anything else. HP he describes as dead to him: their support, quality
and compatibility has plummeted.

Yes, this printer gets a "surprisingly okay" rating from me, as printers
these days mostly seem to have difficulty doing what they should.

cheers,

 Stewart

*: Nait owns Cartridge Ink Plus at Kennedy & Progress (1-7 Progress Ave,
Scarborough, ON, M1P 5A3 — https://www.cartridgeinkplus.com). The store
might appear a little eccentric, but Nait just wants you to have a
reliable printer at a good price. He didn't seem remotely bothered that
I'd buy a printer for less from Canada Computers rather than spend more
at his place.


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