im looking at getting an epson sx200 PSC machine

has anyone any experiance with this or other epson all in one machines with linux?

is the driver any good or are there colour problems like with canon printers

It's not listed in the Openprinting.org database.. so it's not looking to good for that unit to work.
http://www.openprinting.org/printer_list.cgi


http://www.freecolormanagement.com/printer/index.html
http://www.freecolormanagement.com/sane/index.html


Look here for Epson 3rd party drivers
http://www.avasys.jp/lx-bin2/linux_e/spc/DL1.do

if you are very keen on this printer, turboprint have a driver available; and you can rely on their products;

http://www.turboprint.info/printers.html

for the cost of a linux magazine or so, you can purchase their drivers; the latest 2.0 version of turboprint shows ink levels; manages cleaning etc.

we use it for our two Canon iP printers; it works very well for us;

you download the appropriate file, and install; they offer a free product, which is partly disabled; purchase gets you the full product

keep in mind the notice on the Turboprint site..

so the scanner portion is still questionable unless it's supported directly by sane

I see that this is a new product release. If it's anything like the RX700 all-in-one I bought, You'll probably have to wait a year or more before it's completely supported by free drivers. The gutenprint print driver will probably be the first to get support, but it may be quite a while before the sane epson backend adds it specifically. Fortunately though, the epson backend has generic support for unspecified epson scanners, so you should be able to use it at a basic level right away.

But you can also get the official Epson drivers right now from avasys (follow the link in my sig). Unfortunately though, in addition to the fact that they use binary blobs, their code seriously sucks. They also focus almost exclusively on RedHat and Suse, so for Ubuntu you'll probably have to first try converting the RPM's with alien, and if that doesn't work try compiling them yourself. In my case, the iscan/epkowa scanner driver compiled ok on my Athlon K7, but I could never get the cups driver to build. And I could never get either one to work on my AMD64. Perhaps you'll have better luck with it.

Finally, if you feel like shelling out the money, check out turboprint and vuescan. They're both proprietary, but certainly of better quality than the avasys drivers.

hmm thats some food for thought..

in which case can ayone recomend an inkjet printer (preferably an all in one) that works under linux,
is still avalable to buy and uses 4 separate inks rather than a combined colour cartrage

HP has pretty good linux support. Use the openprinting.org database and google and you should be able to locate one.

hmm looked at avalable printers and the openprinting database and it looks like i will go with a brother DCP135C in the end
openprinting says it works totally with a brother supplied OSS driver so all boxes checked there and i will be glad to support anyone who makes drivers avalable!