On Thu, Feb 16, 2006 at 12:00:03PM +0000, Barry Samuels wrote:

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.

A colour laser isn't going to be as good as a colour inkjet. At least that's true unless you spend a very large amount of money and even then I'm not sure that a colour laser does as well as even a much, much cheaper inkjet.

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?

Some of the cheaper colour lasers have specific Linux drivers I think so you don't necessarily need postscript. If I remember right the it's either the Samsung or the Kyocera printers that have Linux drivers. You've got a fairly good chance of getting Linux drivers with HP printers too.

Remember that colour laser running costs can be very high, just as bad as colour inkjet in many cases.

Personally I'd go for a cheap[ish] colour inkjet and a cheap[ish] mono laser, unless you are short of space.

On Thu, 2006-02-16 at 12:00 +0000, Barry Samuels wrote:

I want it to be capable of producing good prints from digital photographic images as well as general documents.

As others have said, even a good Colour laser won't do as good job as a halfway decent photo inkjet on photo work, You can get acceptable results with the right laser and paper also on the low end machines especially, the formatter board/rip engine has to work pretty hard to render the images for raster scan...therefore you will have a reasonable wait for the first print....and if you don't have a lot of onboard ram a lengthy wait for every print.

Also be careful to take all of the consumables into account when deciding on your purchase...As well as the toners there is usually 1 imaging drum (some call it a print unit) for carousels and 4 for an inline, the Fuser and sometimes the waste toner box may also have limited lifespans (although all of these parts are typically quite long lived)

What would I have to spend to get a true Postscript printer? Which ones should I avoid?

Colour lasers break down into two engine types...carousel and inline..Most if not all of the low end machines use the carousel mech because it results in a smaller footprint.

With a carousel the individual imaging units are on a large rotating drum...The unit then makes 4 passes (one for each toner)...These units are cheap, but slower and noisy.

In line is essentially 4 laser printers (one for each colour) in line...these units are typically much faster but are generally expensive workgroup printers and quite large.

Also you have consider that running cost is usually inversely proportional to purchase cost.

Personally I would try to find a good 2nd hand workgroup level printer..it will be cheaper to run and at least repairable if it breaks down...Also at network aware workgroup level I have yet to encounter a unit that doesn't talk native postscript.

Another option is to go for one of the Xerox/Tectronics Solid ink printers...These are not laser printers, but have laser like output and speed (in some cases better)

If you by the wax from ebay (or other low cost supplier) then they are probably cheaper to run.

However there are a few limitations

They hate occasional use, they waste a phenomenal amount of "ink" during the initial start up cycle because they have to purge the heads...then they resort to a warm standby which of course wastes power if you only print now and again.

If you leave them in the warm standby for too long (weeks) without using them, the yellow ink discolours to green.

They are expensive to fix when they go wrong, I do repairs on them but they are very easy to write of if there is a problem with the heads...Generally they are more reliable than a Colour laser however.

On the plus side

They can produce "glossy" output even on standard paper The only consumables are the ink blocks and a maintenance roller. No imaging drums, Transfer belts, waste toner modules or fuser problems to worry about.

If you are looking for a good 2nd hand workgroup printer, then HP 4500's are a good start, they are a solid workhorse A4 carousel, reasonably fast. Spares and consumables are fairly cheap and common. The 4500 in our office is chugging it's merry way to 400,000 prints with replacement pickup rollers being the only maintenance I have performed on it in nearly 4 years. (oh and they work fine with Linux)