Certainly the older printers were solid enough; some of the newer deskjets I've seen were a bit on the flimsy side.

Running a Laserjet 1000 here, still going strong every day, though I had to use the foo2zjs driver.

I have had hardly any problems with HP printers; in many cases, HP printers seem to work better with GNU/Linux than with Windows. Many of the Windows drivers fail to support network printing and will refuse to print if the color cartridge is empty (even if you are printing black only). In fact, I have never purchased an HP printer since the Windows users I know are always giving them away.

That being said, I have never had any success with their scanners or with scanning with an HP all-in-one.

Oh, my standalone scanner will work with sane/xsane, but it makes the scanner run very slowly, puts out an grossly inferior product and the resulting files are huge!
Over the years I've spent many hours trying to tweak xsane, but the output continues to be so bad I would be embarrassed to to send the file on, regardless of how the documents will eventually be used.
So, as previously mentioned, I have Xp running VB, just to run the scanner. Just to be clear, there is nothing wrong with the HP scanner, it is solid well built machine.
The problem is the Linux drivers.
It is another one of those cases where we, the Linux community, seem to be playing catch up with a 12 years old operating system, Xp, and makes one think perhaps they should just bite the bullet and uses ms-winblows. For all we say bad things we said about it (I just don't like mickeysoft and their lack of business ethics), the tasks I need to do daily for business, just work in Xp, but they are always seems to be a problem that needs tweaking in Linux.. or just doesn't work quite right.. or doesn't work at all...
ms-winblows in the 800 pound gorilla so I understand why many open source projects write with it in mind.

Remember to configure xsane properly, you change the resolution (dpi) of the output and the format of the output (pnm is uncompressed and is the default, but you may not want that).

You can also get a preview of what you wanna scan first and crop it before scanning that way scanning is faster and the output is smaller.

Scanning should be absolutely no problem if you want only 24-bit color. But when it comes to 48-bit color I had no success at all.

Second worst, man! The worst is Dell.

(This thread is about printers, however.)

Very probably scanning in raw and saving in a compressed image format solves your problem.

I have a all-in-one HP LaserJet 3015. It is working good under linux, scanner, fax, printer. The scanning quality is not very good though, with small white strips vertically.

I have used http://www.misterinkjet.com/Mail-in_...ng_Service.htm for years. There is a limited number of times that a cartridge can be refilled but it winds up costing about half as much if you can refill 2 or more times, .i.e get 3 uses out of one cartridge.

Let me guess you have one of the consumer grade ones, they all suck. The (business) omnibooks were nice.

I've been meaning to post on here anyway. I have a Scanjet 4300 that just freezes up scanimage and a Photosmart Premium AIO that segfaults it so I can't use either scanner.

Yep. Mine really irritates me.

It costs about USD8.00 only to refill a laser cartridge here in Shenzhen, China. Normally a cartridge could be refilled several times before disposing.

Scanning in RAW?
The closest you will come to that in XSane would be TIFF and that would just slow down the process even further.

Scanning in RAW means to choose None or RAW for compression in the advanced options window of xsane. I purposely mentioned "saving ..." in contrast to "scanning ..." in case you confuse scanner data compression with image file format.

The format TIFF has no indication of the kind of compression (compressed/uncompressed, lossy/lossless, or anything alike).

But if you are sure you can scan in TIFF could you post a screenshot to show how it can be set up? I really wish to learn new things. Thanks!