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!