** Barry Samuels bjsamuels@beenthere-donethat.org.uk [2006-02-16 12:02]:
I want to get a colour laser printer but find the offerings rather confusing. Can anyone recommend one to work with Linux from experience?
I want it to be capable of producing good prints from digital photographic images as well as general documents.
I know that any Postscript printer should work with Linux but I remember seeing someone on ALUG say don't get one which uses Postscript as a layer over the printer's native language because it makes printing slow.
A number of printers describe 'Postscript emulation' or 'Postscript simulation' - is there any difference? Are these the slow ones? Very often it is not clear whether a particular printer is true Postscript or not.
What would I have to spend to get a true Postscript printer? Which ones should I avoid?
** end quote [Barry Samuels]
I can't make any particularly useful specific suggestions unfortunately, although I do use a colour laser with Linux myself, it is an obsolete model (a Lexmark Optra C710 and a big beast at that - I bought it as an end of line back in 2001 iirc). From experience HP are pretty well supported under Linux, although I can't quote whether there are any specific issues with particular printers. A good place to start would probably be linuxprinting.org for a look through the drivers, supported printers and recommendations sections. One thing it is worth watching out for is a number of budget laser printers that are 'Win-printers'. That is, much like Win-modems, a significant part of the logic work is offloaded from the printer into the Windows driver, meaning that there is a significant amount of extra work to be done when trying to build a Linux driver for them.