On Sat, Feb 17, 2001 at 12:21:35PM -0800, David Freeman wrote:

All,

I've decided I need to buy a printer.

After some thought I have decided on the following criteria

• Must run well with Linux
• Lazer printer
• low cost to buy
• Low running costs (<5p a page)
• Reliable

Can any one suggest a good buy?

The moon on a stick?

Seriously, you may not be able to find something which meets all of the requirements above. Looking at the requirements in more detail:

• Must run well with Linux

Most unix (including Linux) programs are designed to work with a Postscript printer. So, for a printer to work well with Linux it must either have a built-in postscript interpreter or it must have a good ghostscript driver so that ghostscript can be used to convert postscript into whatever strange format the printer uses.

I went for the built-in postscript interpreter.

• Lazer printer

I would expect one of these to be much faster and have a lower cost per page than an inkjet, but for an item of similar quality it will be more expensive to buy.

• low cost to buy

A lot depends on what you regard as low cost. Laser printers have got a lot cheaper in recent years but they will still be more expensive than most injkets. You should be able to get a small "personal" laser printer for between about £200 and £500.

• Low running costs (<5p a page)

The printer I have now is an HP Laserjet 2100/M and the toner cartridge costs about £70 with the average life according to HP being 5,000 sheets, i.e. about 2 boxes of paper - my last one lasted slighly longer than this.

I don't remember how much the paper is but I think about £15 per box (1 box = 5 reams = 2,500 sheets) is probably reasonable.

So, adding it up you get 1.4 p/page for toner and 0.6p/page for paper making a total cost of 2p/page.

Compare this with my previous printer which was an Epson Styluscolor - ink cartridges are about £15 and last about 500 pages. Paper is slighly cheaper, say £2.50 per ream so we get 3p/page for ink and 0.5p/page for paper giving a total or 3.5/page.

• Reliable

It's a bit difficult to measure this one. The printer I've got has been reliable so far in that it has never gone wrong and it only jams if I give it paper which is bent or curled.

Can any one suggest a good buy?

I don't think I can recommend any especially good buy.

The printer I have now which is an HP Laserjet 2100/M I am very pleased with. It is fast, the output quality is good, it hasn't barfed on anything I've sent it, is cheap to run and so far seems reliable.

As I said earlier this is the model with built-in postscript (that's indirectly what the /M stands for - /M actually means "for Macintosh" as far as I know but as Macs have a history of expecting postscript printers it indirectly means built-in postscript).

I bought it from PC World at a discount because it was an ex-demo model (unused I am told). I paid £499 for it, their list price was about £700 if I remember correctly.

I have just tested the ljet4 ghostscript driver driving my printer in PCL mode and that seems to produce output that looks almost indistinguishable from the built-in postscript (for the Times Roman font anyway) so this may indicate that a cheaper HP (PCL only, like the 1100 series) would work well too though I can't say for sure.

One thing to do may be to knock up a postscipt test file, one page preferably, which includes samples of all 30-something fonts as well as various shade and screen effects and see if you can get people to print it for comparison.

Hope this helps, Steve.