Printer Shopping
We have decided that is is finally time to retire the HP 990 C — or almost time, at least.
It’s not so much that the printer is bad (it is not at all), and it even has a duplex unit, which I quite like. However, ink is quite expensive to re-fill and a cartridge doesn’t last all that long (that’s even more true for color). Furthermore, ink sometime smears and print quality is generally not as good as laser printers.
Given the current prices, it seems reasonable to get a laser printer as a replacement. Better print quality, lower printing cost, and since we aren’t planning on printing pictures, better over-all satisfaction.
It hasn’t been decided yet if we’ll go color or stay B & W. That depends on what’s out there and the price, I guess. There are other features I consider more important than color capability (and Brigette doesn’t think we’ll need color, either):
- I absolutely need the printer to be supported by Open Source drivers (as listed on LinuxPrinting.org) or else I’ll be S.O.L. with my Solaris box and that wouldn’t be good.
- I would prefer the printer to have a network port. That way we can access it from both our computers without one acting as print server, which has to be on at all times (like it is right now). That’ll be more important when Brigette gets a laptop as her main workstation. It’ll presumably be in power-saving mode for the most time when not in use, as opposed to always-on.
- If the printer supported Postscript natively, that’d be even better.
I found a few Samsung printers at FutureShop and NCIX that look promising as well as a couple of HPs. We’ll see. The hunt is on.
If anybody has any preferences/recommendations, please don’t hesitate to make them known.
Comment by Ryan
March 14, 2007 @ 14:22
The HP Color LaserJet 2605 is really nice as it supports PostScript natively, JetDirect printing, and works with CUPS. (pretty much any PostScript printer works with CUPS) It can be found for less than $500 as well. If you pay a bit more, you can get one with a web interface for various management tasks. We also have higher end color 4600 series printers which are for heavier duty cycles.
I actually found your blog via your maintainer page on blastwave as I’m trying to find a native Solaris solution for supporting some DeskJet printers. Do you use cups/hpijs on Solaris to support DeskJet printing? Does it get things like margins right? Does it support, e.g. duplex inkjet printing? (I’ve never used blastwave, but if hpijs works I’m thinking of giving it a shot.)
Comment by markus
March 14, 2007 @ 22:15
Thanks for the tips on the LJ 2605. That was actually one of the printers I was looking at.
Yes, I am using CUPS and hpijs myself and it does work.
The actual setup is like this: my Ultra 60 prints via CUPS on an HP 990C which is connected to my wife’s Windows 2000 workstation. That means Samba comes into play here, too.
No issues whatsoever. Even the duplex unit works. Mind you, you have to configure a separate queue that prints duplex, as most applications don’t allow you to change print settings other than the print queue. KDE applications are the exception. Here you can set pretty much everything like you would under Windows.
Comment by Ryan
March 15, 2007 @ 12:27
Okay, thanks, I’ll give the packages a shot.
I wonder if your dual queue issue can be solved via CUPS aliases. For instance, given the print queue ‘pr1′, the command ‘lpoptions -p pr1/4d -o sides=two-sided-long-edge -o number-up=4′ creates the printer alias pr1/4d with the options for duplex and 4-up printing. If one then sends a job to pr1/4d without any additional options, e.g. ‘lpr -P pr1/4d’ the job will be automatically duplexed and 4-upped. These options are saved to the file ‘~/.lpoptions’.