The HP Photosmart 8150 printer works perfectly in Linux (Slackware 10.2). Documents print fine however colour printouts, while looking good are not as good as files printed straight off the 8150's flash card loader.
Text printing is very fast, especially in the enconomy modes. Text is not lighter in shade which is good. Their is however some slight ink bleeding of characters but not really noticable unless really looking for it.
Occassionly the printers' feeder may take up more than one page, sometimes up to 4 or 5 particularly in the super fast modes. It's best to fan or flick through paper before inserting it into the feeder, although sometimes it depends on the humidity of the room and paper quality (so really more a paper issue than a printer issue).
A good feature of the printer is being able to print up to 4 pages on one page (available under the properties button in the kde print dialog).
Another handy feature is the ability to use the color cartridge to print black text when you run out of black ink.
The printer requires HP's HPLIP driver here: http://hpinkjet.sourceforge.net
Printer settings are handled via CUPS (http://localhost:631/admin) with a max print resolution of 1200dpi.
The HPLIP driver includes a Device Manager (hp-toolbox) that displays the printer status and other misc info. It can scan and unload pictures from flash cards inserted into the 8150 even without scsi and usb mass storage support included in your kernel. Strangely while it can delete files it has no file upload feature. To do that you must mount the printers' flash reader like you would with any other usb flash memory device.
A USB Card Reader HowTo can be found here: http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...&artid=115
The following is an installation guide if anyone's having difficulties:
------INSTALLING THE HP PHOTOSMART 8150-----------
These instructions are for installing on Slackware. The most helpful install guide was written by 'MMYoung' in a Slackware thread on Linuxquestions.org:
MMYoung
Member
Registered: Apr 2004
Location: Arkansas
Distribution: Slackware-10.1
Posts: 187
These are the install instructions I have posted for my personal package. They've worked everytime for me and others have installed using these instructions with no problems.
This software requires the following to be installed:
kdebindings-3.3.x
kdelibs-3.3.x
kdemultimedia-3.3.x
qt-3.3.x,
net-snmp-5.2.x.
If you already have KDE installed then the only package you need is net-snmp from linuxpackages.net, everything else is installed with a full install of Slackware Install CD1. I use Gnome so I had to install the KDE stuff to satisfy all dependencies.
1. Install kdebindings, kdelibs, kdemultimedia, and qt (if necessary).
2. Install net-snmp.
3. Install hplip
4. cd to /etc/rc.d and rename rc.hplip.new to rc.hplip.
5. Run ./rc.hplip start. You should just see two lines ending in OK, anything else
and there's a problem. Note any errors.
6. You will need to add the following (or something similar) to your rc.local file
so that rc.hplip will run at boot.
# Start the HPLIP Printer/Scanner service
if [ -x /etc/rc.d/rc.hplip ]; then
echo "Starting HPLIP Printer/Scanner Daemon"
/etc/rc.d/rc.hplip start
echo "HPLIP Started"
fi
7. Next you need to restart cups by running /etc/rc.d/rc.cups restart
8. If everything worked so far, click on Applications --> Accessories --> HP Device Manager
Later,
MMYoung
To set up CUPS you can follow the instructions on HP's site here: http://hpinkjet.sourceforge.net/install.php#print_queue
Note: When using Gimp make sure when printing you click on 'setup printer' and delete the raw commands after 'lp' and click 'save settings' otherwise it won't print.
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*Below is an interesting discusson I found regarding the HP Photosmart 8150 in Linux
Quote:
RYXI > Printers > HP Photosmart 8150 under Linux and from Card 28 Dec 2004 00:19:46
Matthias 27 Dec 2004 23:14:02
Hi,
I read on the HP page that the Photosmart 8150 prints "up to" 4800 x 1200 "when printing from a computer". Now my question is: what is the resolution when printing from a memory card without a computer? How much worse are the prints?
Also, I'm planning to use the linux drivers most of the time (it's very inconvenient to boot Windows just to print out a picture). I read in a magazine that the linux drivers produce not quite as nice pictures as do the Win or Mac drivers. Has anybody some similar experience? How much different are the results? (I know, that's probably hard to quantify.)
Thanks in advance for any responses.
Matthias
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REPLY
Quote:
Bob Headrick 28 Dec 2004 00:19:46 [ permanent link ]
"Matthias" <no@spam.pls> wrote in message
news:36wsm5ry2o5.fsf@hundertwasser.ti.uni-mannheim.de...
There is not a lot of difference. The average user may not see any difference, a pro would notice some differences, especially in side by side comparisons.
The later DeskJet and Photosmart devices (all those that use the #56/57/58 or 96/97/99 cartridges or similar) normally do most of the processing in the printer. (This is called VIP mode). The driver can send jpg data to the printer and the printer does the rendering. For these printers the host driver is not nearly as important, as long as it does use the capabilities of the printers. The high resolution modes are rendered by the host and there would likely be mode differences. Personally I never use the high resolution modes; "Best" mode is for most purposes the same quality and prints twice as fast as the high resolution mode.
Regards,
Bob Headrick, not speaking for my employer HP
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