So I'm getting pretty sick of my Epson photo inkjet printer.  It does
beautiful photos when it's running clean, but it needs to be used at least
weekly to keep from clogging up, and it's managing to get ink on the edges
and corners of paper now.  And it's $50 to get new cartridges (BW & color).

I'm thinking I'm going to ditch it and get a basic laser printer.  So far it
looks like HP has some nice models in the < $500 range, and in the past at
least the reliability has been great.  I'd prefer Epson because of their
willingness to share driver info with open-source developers, but they don't
seem to have any laser printers at all.

Any suggestions?

26 responses total.

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HP printers are generally well-supported by Linux.  Some of their
low-end lasers have an annoying lack of front panel information that can
make diagnostics a bit frustrating, though.

Right now I'm looking at the HP 1150 vs. 1300.  Probably the same print engine
and therefore the same reliability.  Resolution and capacity would be more
than enough for my needs.  Roughly $100 price difference.

The other part of this is that I had some copies made of a digital photo at
the nearby photo shop (Focus Photo, at Stadium & Jackson).  The guy there even
did a bit of color tweaking I wouldn't have known about, and I suspect having
him do the occasional photo will be cheaper than coddling a consumer inkjet.

I'm just a little worried that HP quality may have slipped in recent years,
with the whole Compaq merger mess and such.  The LaserJet 4 at my old office
is still running like a tank after almost 11 years...

Why don't you buy a used laser printer?

I'm a bit leery of printers already... used might have real problems. Still,
I might be interested - do you have a source?

I called Computer Alley, and they're pushing the Samsung 1710 for about $200.
Turns out there's manufacturer support for Linux, and the guy at Computer
Alley says they're at least as reliable as the HP equivalents.

We gave a laser printer to a friend who complained about the cost of inkjet
cartridges, but does not appear to be using that printer.  It is a fairly old
Okidata that works for DOS.  I don't know if you need something that works
with the latest Windows, and if not, we might be able to get back the Okidata
for you.  It is a nice small one that has a draft quality setting on it.
Probably built a lot better than the new ones.  Might do 600 dpi. For text,
does it matter?

600dpi would be preferable.  It's noticable on some text, but especially on
charts and other graphics.

New HP printers have a lot more plastic in them than old ones did.  I
can't say whether this has affected reliability, though, because the
only printer of that era we have at work is less than two years old.

Sometimes old HP II and III-series printers can be had pretty cheaply at
surplus sales.  They're only 300 dpi, but they're extremely cheap to
run.  They use the Canon SX print engine.  Toner cartridges are about
$50 for 10,000 pages.  On any used one you can expect to have to change
the paper feed tires, which harden with age and cause the printer to
fail to pick up sheets.  New feed tires are about $7; some disassembly
is necessary to change them.  I have a Laserjet IID, and my biggest
complaint about it is it's physically very large.

So I bought the Samsung... but the manufacturer Linux support is a sick joke.
It's actually pretty easy to use standard Linux drivers for the ML-4500, which
uses the same print engine.  The Samsung Linux driver (included on CD) is evil
at best, and I made the mistake of installing it.  :(

I'll keep the printer, but I've got a mess to clean up from the Samsung
driver.

I find the gimp-print drivers are usually superior to the foomatic or
ghostscript ones.  It wasn't until gimp-print came out that I was
finally able to print properly centered pages on my IID.  The
ghostscript driver offsets everything half an inch to the right.

A decent ending, so far.  I stayed up a bit later than usual and installed
Fedora 1 (basically RedHat 10) linux.  It's really nice... worth the trouble.
And I'm enjoying having a laser printer.  Photos aren't that good (and no
color), but the text and basic graphics look great.

Are there any domestic/sub-industrial printers that will
work with soy-based inks?  Perhaps it's time to warm up my
old daisywheel printer.  Pity it lacks a sheet feeder.

Why? Is your paper turning vegetarian? ;-P

:-)

I may have need of a laser printer.  Are there any current
models that don't suck horribly?  Whatever I buy has to
understand PostScript, should have a couple of paper trays
that can take A4, letter and perhaps legal paper.  I don't
mind if the drum is built into the toner cartridge.
Inexpensive toner cartridges would be an advantage.

Why does it need to understand postscript instead of ussing a printer driver?

I chose a Brother 2070N. No legal paper option. I chose it for being both
inexpensive and network ready. Uses a printer driver. 

Re #17: It's one less layer of software to debug.

I print with ghostscript or netpbm (which prints to any PCL 5 printer).

Ghostscript is definitely a useful program.  If I found a
laser printer that lacked PostScript but met my requirements
otherwise, I'd certainly consider it. I usually track pkgsrc
-current and occasionally a package breaks.  It would be
frustrating if that happened to ghostscript and I couldn't
print.  If the printer understands PostScript, that's one
less package to worry about.

I just compiled ghostscript myself.  Not much involved other than downloading
a few things it requires you have the source code or, or the installed headers
and .so libraries for.  I got a much smaller executable by choosing only the
printers I do have, not everything on the default list.  2.6MB plus fonts.
Including the init files (1MB of them).  I chose most of the deskjet and laser
printer drivers and p?m devices.  A postscript printer might have more
physical things on it to break.  We recycled one with a motherboard that had
a dead battery.

Not much involved when it works ;-)

Has it ever stopped working for you?  The motherboard with dead battery would
have been $800 to replace ($450 if you hunted around).  What does a new
postscript printer cost now?

Re resp:16: Try to get a printer with a network interface built-in.  
It's more convenient *and* it seems to increase the odds that the 
printer will support Postscript.  I don't have any specific 
recommendations, though; lately most of the units I've been dealing 
with have been large business-class printers.

My wife was itching to buy a new printer and I didn't have the time or
inclination to research a lot of different printers so I just said
"buy whatever appeals to you".  She came home with an HP inkjet that
has a 10baseT (or perhaps 100baseTX) port on it.  I have yet to figure
out what protocols the printer uses, but it would be nice if I could
print to it from my NetBSD desktop and my Linux laptop.

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