Printer Recommendation (Slackware 12.2, looking for laser printer for network)
 

Hi guys,

I have to admit I've never bought a printer before, and I would really love some suggestions from people who have bought a good Black and White laser printer and are happy with their choice. If you have any tips (which make/model, what to look out for, links to guides/tutorials/documentation,) that'd be great.

My main criteria for finding a printer are:
Works great with Slackware
Black and white laser
Can easily be shared over the network (whether this is by builtin ethernet card or shared from a Slackware box connected to the network.)
(Hopefully) In the sub-200 dollar range.

Thanks for your tips and wealth of experience!

-Nathan

Update: 8/27/2009
Thanks for all the wonderful replies! I chose the HP P1006, and it works great! I just made /etc/rc.d/rc.cups executable and started it, and then set up the printer with "hp-toolbox" which was installed with my default 12.2 full install. Printing in Linux is not the hassle I thought it might be, the new printer is very fast and quiet.

Thanks again for all your suggestions!

I've purchased, hooked up, recommended, etc, about a dozen Samsung ML(1500-20**) over the past few years, and have never had a problem under either Linux or that other os.

They can be found everywhere for around $100, and the cartridges are often price on the softer side of gouging.

cheers,

I'd say HP is a good brand if you're looking for Linux-friendly. I recently bought an HP Officejet J4680 (inkjet) wireless printer and it works well with Slackware 12.2. Easier to setup than windows even.

The profit in low-end printers is in consumables---I guess Lasers are no exception.

For any printer, I think the best Linux support continues to be HP. Last I checked, Lexmark was the antithesis.

Almost any printer should work - except Lexmark consumer printers. As pixellany states, HP printers are usually the best, as everyone else has a couple that don't work under Linux. Your best bet is to check http://linuxprinting.org, or whatever they call themselves these days.

hello,

hp has best support for linux but is very expensive in comsumables.

We are very satisfied with Oki in business use, good quality, low cost. But I don't know how about their linux-support.

Markus

Hi,

I like the 'Brother' personal Laser printers. As for consumables, it's cheaper to by a new printer than to by or repair cartridges. I find the 'Brother' Laser for under $100, usually on sale for around $49-$60. I've got a 'HL-2140' down stairs waiting to be installed to replace a older Brother. The replacement cartridge cost around $35 so why not just replace with a probable upgraded printer. I've purchased a network capable 'Brother' for <$70. I'm waiting to get the double sided 'Brother' <$100. :)

I recently bought Brother laser (multi-function) MFC7420 and works perfectly with Slackware. I'm also sharing the printer via Samba and works flawlessly as network printer for Windows machines. There's only one caveat, you'll have to install drivers provided by Brother. The drivers are in RPM format which can easily be converted to tgz via rpm2tgz. BTW, the printer works on both x86 & x86_64 Slackware.

Hi,

Not always. You can use 'ppd' files that are available. If memory serves me the 1250.ppd works with most of the newer Brother laser printers. Not sure about the MFP, you will probably need to use the releases by Brother for the multi-function printers.

As I stated before it's been a while so I'll find out when putting the HL-2140 in service.

What's nice (bad?) about Brother Laser printers are that the toner cartridge and drum are sold separately. The drum only needs to be replaced after every 15,000-20,000 pages. ~$35-$60 for the toner and ~$80-$120 for the drum. Brother's normal capacity toners are rated for 1500 pages. For the HL-2040 it is $45-$55 for a 1500 page toner, and $105-$115 for the drum. Brother does offer high capacity toners that are a better value than the standard toners.

HP and Samsungs are a toner/drum all in one design. HP 92a 2500 pages $65, Samsung ML-1710-D3 3000 pages $80, same as the 2010-D3 for newer ML entry lasers.

(For toner prices, I shop newegg, staples, officedepot, and microcenter)

I've owned a Samsung ML-1740 for 4+ years. Got it on sale, and after rebate for $25!!! This is Samsung's sub $100 laser. Toners are $79.99 locally, and I can order remanufactured ones for $50. The remanu'd ones don't last as long as OEM, nor is the print as dark. You do save $30 up front, but instead of the normal ~3500 pages per toner, I only average 1800-2200 pages, and sometimes have to reprint because of the low quality.

All HP lasers besides the cheapest $100 models, are excellent. If you only want to spend less than $125, Brother and Samsung make a much better printer at that price level. Once you get to the $200+ range, it's hard to be an HP. Although long gone are the days of HP's 4P laser printers. These things were true work horses, and lasted 10-15 years.

My Samsung is near replacement, and I'm thinking about getting a Brother. Only because of the size and looks :) Their models are half the size of my Samsung, and are quite easy on the eyes.

You're right about the PPD files. Actually Brother rpm contain ppd file for my printer so I can easily extract the file and just place it in the system for cups to pick it up.

What I was saying above was from a perspective of a newbie. I'm not sure how proficient the OP is so he may or may not be able to do that. Installing the drivers from Brother would be a easier way to get started than to fiddle with the ppds ::D

Hi,

I've yet to need to replace the drum. :) As I said it's just as cheap to replace the printer than a cartridge.

BTW, I know that I get way beyond the 1500 pages. I do agitate not shake the toner cartridge by gently rolling the cartridge with circular motion of my hands (out of sync of course) without turning the cartridge over. :) I do this with every ream of paper through the printer. Some say it's a waste of time but I do get everything out of that cartridge. Knock, Knock,, Knock,,, on head, I mean wood. A little pause between knocks. :)

Refill your own toner.
http://www.tonerkits.com/

Hi,
I've done the toner kit refill and find it too messy. I'll just buy the new printer at the low cost then donate to a local charity a good printer when the time comes. As I said their dirt cheap now a days. I gain with the new printer and the charity gains with a slightly used printer. Let the charity buy a new cartridge. :)

I'll vote for hp as well. As far as consumables are concerned I can usually get at least 4 DIY refills out of a bw cartridge which makes a big difference. I have a 930c purchased maybe 8 years ago shared on the lan as the BW printer and a psc2355 shared as as two different color printers (300 and 600 dpi). I've never been satisfied with quality after refilling the color cartridge on the psc but we don't print colour much. The 930c's colour cartridge dried up long ago but there's no warnings on either slack machines or virtual XP when printing from it.

There are plenty of good b/w laser printers from different makes. In my experience Brother, Canon, Hewlett-Packard and Kyocera are usually very reliable. They normally support, at least, one of the common printer languages, such as Postscript, PCL (HP) or Epson emulation, and can therefore be used with Linux without any problems. Sometimes the default driver doesn't offer all options, such as maximum resolution or toner saving mode. In most cases, you'll find a PPD file on the net that will solve this.

In the meantime all mentioned vendors support printing on Linux quite well, and all four offer good quality. E. g. I have no problems with my old Canon LBP4+ and my newer Kyocera FS-1010.

Recommendation: What's best for you depends largely on your printing volume. If you plan to print a lot, then the price of consumables will be much more important for you than the price of the device. If you only print a few pages a week, it's not so important, although the replacement cost when the cartridge is empty, can be a major shock, then.

From my own experience (and confirmed by many tests online and in print magazines) for printing-only I'd recommend Kyocera. The printing cost are the lowest in the industry, and their products are relatively environmentally friendly (the toner is less hazardous, they emit less ozone and so on). Not sure, if their products are available for less then $200 in your area, but on the long run you'll save more than the added cost thanks to lower power consumption and cheaper consumables. Also good: The Kyocers product are usually not as loud as, e. g., HP devices.

What is more, is that the Kyocera support is very customer-friendly. When I first installed my FS-1010 I could not use the highest resolution. I called the support, and the next day (!) I had a new CD in my mailbox with a fixed PPD.

Also excellent are some Canon models. They are better than Kyocera, if you want to print on thicker media, often, and generally have the least number of paper jams of all makes mentioned (but it's not a real problem with the others). Usually you need only a PPD file from their website or from Linux-printing.org (or is it Open-printing.org, now?). In the meantime, Canon offers drivers for download for many products on their web site, too. IMHO, Canon and HP are slightly better in printing quality (but the others are not to blame for anything), Kyocera and Brother are much more economical.

For all vendors I recommend to stay away from the very cheapest models. They are slow, and paper jams are a frequent problem. E. g., don't buy a Kyocera device with a model number below 1000. Also, avoid so-called GDI printers --- GDI is proprietary Windows-only interface.

There are much more differences, if we talk about multi-function devices:

HP has the most comfortable Linux support: thanks to their excellent open-source project HPLIP setup is a breeze, and the Linux desktop integration is very elegant. Duplex printing and scanning and faxing work flawlessly. Print quality is excellent, scanning quality is better on Linux than on Windows because their scan software for Windows is rubbish, but it's not their strongest point on Linux, either. HP devices usually print fast, but scan slowly. Consumable prices are average to expensive.

Canon scores, IMHO, with the fastest and best scanners, and very good printing quality. The Canon drivers support CUPS for printing. For scanning they provide proprietary drivers and tools, that work quite well. A growing number of Canon products is also supported by SANE. But sending faxes directly from a PC application works only on Windows, and the software doesn't integrate well with KDE (it's ok with Gnome).

Brother is my current overall favourite for multifunction devices. They have the most complete Linux support, including sending faxes from applications, such as KWord or OpenOffice.org, but setup and desktop integration is far behind the elegance of the HP solution. What I do like about their products are the big keys. All other makers tend to shrink key to sizes that are just unusable for European or North American hands. Also, they currently have, along with Kyocera, the most consistent quality in their line-up. Even the low-end products are of good production quality, and Brother offers a 3-year warranty for them. They include a comprehensive (and comprehensible!) user manual, and offer excellent email support. Regarding environment friendliness they are only second to Kyocera. Their print quality is usually good, but not as good as with Canon, their scan quality is average, but better than with HP. Only disadvantage: Scanning is slow and loud, printing is average to very slow, depending on the model (on the low end; their high-end devices are quite fast).

I don't have practical experience with Kyocera multifunction devices, as they don't offer a low-end device. Their medium range of products is said to have the lowes printing cost in their class, and to be quite fast. Scan quality seems to be good enough for office purposes, but leaves something to wish for, when you want to scan a photo at high quality.

Please note, that I described typical characteristics base on personal and subjective experience. What I said above may or may not be true for a particular device.

gargamel

I have a 2170W, I believe you'll find the 2140 is the same, and the control channel uses a proprietary protocol. So if you want to use 'toner save mode', set resolution, etc. you have to use the Brother driver.

The ppd file and wrapper are buried in the RPM install script. I wrote a slackbuild that combines the two RPMS into one package and extracts the ppd and wrapper. It will *probably* work for the 2140, if you'd like it I will post it for you.

It may be worth it to buy a color lazer. Granted toner refills can be $200+... you can find refurbished cartridges for under $100. The only problem with refiling toner rather than replacing the whole cartridge is that it can be very very messy and all the printing heads and other things on the cartridge don't last for more than 2 refills with the same quality.

That being said. I recently got a Konica Minolta Magicolor 5320 DL and it's refurbished. It was under $150 on Fry's special and the duplexer was $60. Prints great and there are official linux binaries and source code for the drivers. I opted to repackage their precompiled RPMs because it required static libs for jbigkit and lcms... lcms is installed with only shared libs on slackware-current and I didn't feel like altering the build lines in the Makefile or installing lcms with static libs.


That being said... if you find a great deal, look up the cartridge price at full value and refurbished. Then attempt to install official drivers or use ones that come with slackware. If those are agreeable you are good to go.

Reading my own post again a day later it looks a bit... lengthy...

Therefore, to make a long story short, a summary.

For low volume b/w printing quality of most laser printers is very good, regardless of the make or model. Differences are in features (duplex ADF, connectivity with USB only, or with support for Ethernet or WLAN) and running cost (consumables and power consumption in operation and in stand-by mode).

If I was in your shoes I'd go for Kyocera or Brother. In case you are interested in getting a colour laser, as suggested in one post, my recommendation would be something like HP Laserjet 1312, or something from Brother.

gargamel

in this times, almost all printers work, but i recomend hp.
i have an epson c79

I bought my first B&W printer a few months ago, and its doing a good job for me.

Its a brother HL-2035, it cost £50 ($70), and I refill my own toner cartridges, a refill costs £10, but I also had to buy a starter flag (which is needed to reset the printer when you refill), because brother didnt include one with the starter toner cartridge, but its really simple to fit.

now instead of paying 40 40 40 40 40 for branded toner, Im paying 10 10 10 10 40 (because once the drum is screwed you do need to buy a new drum unit), but you can see the saving.

I use the offical brother drivers and use the rpmtotgz program to convert it to tgz ofcourse (think thats already been mentioned), and then I have to excute a brother script so that CUPS sees the driver. but Im very pleased with it.

Thank you all for your replies! I really appreciate all the recommendations.

I should be getting the new printer in the next few weeks, and I'll update this thread about how it goes!

HP LaserJet 1020, HP LaserJet P100x
 

They need the Zenographics foo2zjs driver, but are quite fast. So far I haven't had any trouble with them.

Thanks for all the suggestions, I chose the HP P1006 and it works excellently!