nutmeg's blog

hardware sucks

I have been pondering buying an entry level color laser printer, mainly for my dad (Vista) but of course at least bw-text should work with Linux, too. As expected, the situation is slightly worse than I expected.

• The printers come with toner cartridges that only contain a fracture of a real cartridge (33% to 70% depending on the model). And of course the real toner is rather expensive. HP's LJ1600 seems to be the worst offender, at EUR 160 it contains "start toner" worth EUR 133, a full original refill is EUR 235. (On a sidenote, the LJ2600N is a much better deal, it has full toner and costs only EUR 60 more.)
• Every single company still has their own home grown version of protocol for host-based printers. And it still changes.
• Most of them have free drivers, however Samsung's color laser printer's use the patent-encumbered JBIG algoritm, so we probably won't have them in Debian anytime soon.
• The only difference between Konica Minolta's 2500W and 2530DL seems to that the latter has got Ethernet in addition to USB. Amazingly however they seem to require different drivers even for USB. The former does not work at all under Linux but the latter is supported by foo2lava.
• An excellent source of information, linuxprinting.org, seems to have lost a little bit of its edge. The information there seems to be slightly dated now. Darn.

I started looking at not low end inkjets, too, The first likely candidate Canon PIXMA iP3500 or iP4500 made a quite entertaining research on the linux side. There are no free drivers and Canon's binary ones are strange. Quoting the wnpp bug:

• The packages are actively developed upstream (good!), but not maintained (what?!): each released version supports the then-current printer models only, and is not maintained after release.
• For a start, there is no canonical english web site for these packages, the URL in the package description is japanese only..

Please note that some Canon Printers are supported by gutenprint, e.g. the iP4500, just not as well as Epson printers.