I have been using a Brother HL2040 for about 5 years now. It has worked for me without problems on several distors. ( Slackware 13.37-64 and Slack 14-32 now ).

I can buy after market toner cartridges at about 70% the cost of a Brother cartridge. One last about 18 months in our house. Four users across the network using it.

My current scanner is a HP G4010. I purchased it to make digital copies of a large slide collection. I use V-box and XP for that function. The windbloze driver works well with this scanner and slides, or negatives.

For most of my every day scans, I use xsane. It gives me satisfactory results for daily use. I'm still learning how to get the best results from xsane.

Found what you are talking about under, "Preferences, Setup, filetype." Then I spent about 2 1/2 hours scans various items to jpg, pdf and tiff, and comparing them to the items scanned in Xp with the HP drivers. Going from RAW to jpg resulted in colors that were not as "muddy" as they have been witn Xsane in the past, but no where near the original colors nor was amount the detail close to the same items scanned with the HP windows drivers at the same dpi. Going to .pdf resulted in the worst I've seen to date, and tiff didn't improve a thing. Interesting experiment, but a overall a wasted 2 1/2 hours.


That might turn out to be a life long pursuit.

Once again, could you please distinguish scan compression from image file type? I have already said that the option is in the "advanced options" window. You can make that window visible from the Window menu of xsane.

Excuse me, but scanning a document and saving an image file are two things completely irrelevant.

We must be speaking different languages and using different
versions of XSane.
Here is a screen shot. As you can see the "advanced settings" box is blank.

Attached Thumbnails

 

I had an OfficeJet G85 and a Scanjetp 4p (SCSI) from HP, and was very satisfied. But when the G85 reached its EOL, HP had nothing available, I liked (it's much better now, again).

So I have a Brother MFC, now. Comparison:


Scanning
HP Scanjet 4p is slow, loud, and scans are shifted to red to a really annoying degree. This can be compensated for in image processing to a degree, but it requires an additional step of processing, to get acceptable results. However, it's a CCD scanner, so despite of its seemingly inferior optical resolution, it's can adapt its depth-of-field and cope with double-page scans of open books or magazines easily.
The Brother MFC has problems with that, like all CMOS scanners. But it's faster, supports multipage scans via ADF (it really *works* with XSane!) and has a much higher optical resolution.

Printing
Current HP printers including OfficeJet tend to produce print-outs with noticeable and annoying red-shifts. Some people like it, though, as it makes photos look more "vivid" and "warmer". Good for snapshots, but embarrassing for nature photos.
The inexpensive Brother MFC-290 suffers from similar problems --- when used in Windows! Under Linux, it provides the most natural colours in photos I have seen so far, with default settings. But it takes ages to print a hi-res photo, and I did not manage to get proper borderless photos for formats bigger than 10 cm x 15 cm.
After email correspondence with the HP support, they really updated the printer driver, and it got better, indeed. In most cases only the bottom margin of the printout has white border, while the top, left and right margins are gone. Not perfect, but certainly an improvement and a good example for friendly (Linux) end-user support! But as I said: HP support used to be very good in the past, too.

Faxing
The Brother has a real fax switch. What's the correct English term for this? I am talking of the part that is used in real fax devices to distinguish between voice and fax calls and makes the right device accept the call. Brother uses that part also in MFCs.

Networking
I can't comment on Brother products, but I can tell that HP's architecture requires to have proper drivers for the respective HP device on your client computer in order to use the network printer. This is even true for their biggest devices, specified for hundreds of print jobs by thousands of users each month. And this means, that you have to update the driver on all clients, if the firmware of the printer is updated or changed. A no-go for large companies.

Linux support
Both companies offer Linux drivers for their products. HP's HPLIP is very comfortable, but somewhat proprietary, while Brother drivers integrate well with the Linux infrastructure. Unfortunately, Brother printer drivers are only 32-bit. This means, you need to add multilib support to your 64-bit system, which can cause problems with compiling software from source, in my experience. HP and Brother are the only ones to support direct faxing from Linux (Canon, e. g., does not).

Support for Linux users
Both companies offer good support, but HP used to be better in the past than they are now. But it's still good enough, in my experience. I have read many reports, that HP customers are very disappointed regarding support quality. Well, I can't confirm that. One difference is, that with HP it's better to call them, while Brother responds quickly, friendly and professionally to emails, as well. Email inquiries to HP seem to remain unanswered, in many cases, so my tip is: Just give them a call!

General
Brother offers 3 years of warranty at no additional cost, and the build quality is quite good. Current HP hardware looks a bit cheap, at times, but newest devices seem finally to be better again. Neither my Brother MFC, nor current HP hardware matches the rock-solid build quality of old HP products, such as the G85 (which, like the Brother MFC, also had a fax switch, BTW).

Alternatives
For printing-only my #1 choice is Kyocera, because they make the most economic and environmental-friendly printers on Earth. Canon laser printers are also good, almost indestructable, excellent print quality, and their multifunction devices are good, too, again, but check carefully which functions are actually supported for Linux.

Recommendation
Of course, there is no simple "choose A" or "choose B". But, at least, for the lower (but not the lowest) end, it doesn't matter that much, if you choose Brother MFC or HP Officejet, although I'd give Brother the edge for better buld quality and 3-year-warranty. For printing-only you really should take Kyocera laser printers into consideration, also. In the midrange, Canon MX multifunction printers seem to be very good, but under Linux it may not be possible to exploit their potential. Whatever product from whatever maker you are interested in, check, if drivers for Linux are available and maintained, and to what degree they support the features of the hardware (this is not always easy, I know that).

gargamel

If you are speaking different languages then the followings may be too difficult for you to understand:

A simple search on the Internet shows that your scanner is supported by sane since version 1.0.18, and has "no known problems" at 300 dpi, which resolution you are currently using. I don't say it's impossible that you have image quality issue at 300 dpi. I just think it's improbable.

It is the condescending "heathkit types" that drive people away from Open Source and into the arms of mickeysoft, google, apple and the like. Those so deep into their "field of interest" they can't possibly see sunlight and break down what they know into terms useful to anyone but other nerds.

There is a problem. There has been for years. I've so many hours trying to tweak xsane it probably would add up to several days at this point.

It really is getting old and I'm getting old. Too old to keep taking the time or to have the interest in fixing things every time they break. Just this morning I booted up to find the sound is no longer working. I did nothing yesterday to "break it," but this morning it will work for root, but not for the user.

I think I'm about done here. I've reach the point in life that I just want the thing to work. Most of the applications that need to work, that have to work, for daily business purposes (and personal, as far as that goes), just don't work as well in Linux as they do in, ugh, ms-winblows. The drivers, modules in *.nix speak, are, usually, first written for, ugh, ms-winblows, and reverse engineered for Linux.
Time to move on.

FWIW, I have been looking into why scanning with xsane doesn't produce as good as results with the same hardware in linux as with XPppp.

I believe, at this point it has to do with color management. When a manufacturer produces a product that uses color, they produce a file ( possibly more than one ) that is used for color management. In XP there are .icm files that can be found in /WINDOWS/system32/drivers/color/. In theory, these files should allow an application to produce the same color on one device as another. Example, a jpeg from a camera to a printed picture; scanner to video display.

That said, I had no files like that on a new Slackware 14, 32 bit system. I do have them on XP. These files should work on any platform, you can copy them from what ever, to linux.

Here is a the list of files I copied from XP.

I can not tell if one of these files is used by my HP G4010 on XP, or if it is within the driver; or some other location. xsane does have the ability to use this type of file, if you can figure out where it is.

My two bits worth. BTW, I looked at the support pages for HP, did lots of googling, and have not figured out where to get the correct .icm file(s) for this scanner.

This is as much the hardwares makers lack of support for linux as anything else.

If anyone else has knowledge of this, please let us know.

1 members found this post helpful.

All true, unfortunately: "No known problems" doesn't mean, that XSane can make use of advanced features of a device. It just meanst that it can do, what it can do with every device of the same category, flawlessly. And flawlessly doesn't mean, that the result is convincingly good in quality, but that it can be generated without hickups.

As long as there are no SANE "drivers" from the vendor, the backend can only be supported in a generic way, obviously, using open and documented standards and APIs. It's difficult for the developers to support intrinsic properties specific to a given device. Colour management is just one example. Another one is support for fax functionality of many Canon devices, that cannot be used under Linux, not even with Canon drivers in many cases, although printer and scanner functionality work quite well. Another problem is ADF of scanners or duplex print.

The Windows drivers for the same products can compensate for weaknesses of the product, like too much of red in HP scanners. In Linux, you'll have to either compensate for that using some image processing software in an additional, time-consuming step in your workflow, or use commercial software like Vuescan, which is available for Linux, and said to be able to create equally good results as the Windows version.

In any case, the best recommendation is, to carefully check, how well a piece of hardware is supported under Linux, before you buy it. But I know, that this is not always easy, as product lifecycle is short, and no reasonable information is usually available for new devices. And when the required information is available, it is not longer possible to buy the device, as there is already a new model, of which noone knows, how well it is supported under Linux. But one tip might help: Prefer devices, that support their functionality in hardware, and don't depend on software drivers. E. g., if you are interested in a multifunction printer with fax, choose one, that can do fax without the PC *and* with fax software support in Linux. But as I said above, this will give you a good chance, that the device will *work*, but it doesn't mean that it will produce results equally good as under Linux. Some devices do, others don't.

BTW, I have two devices here, that work *better* under Linux than they do under Windows:
(1) Photos from my Brother MFC-290C look just great, sharp and crisp, but not "over-sharpened", and with very natural colours. Under Windows I was not able to produce the same quality, even after fiddling some time with the software bundled with the device. The only thing, that I was able to do under Windows, and not under Linux, were borderless A4 printouts of photos. Under Linux I always have a small white border at the bottom margin.
(2) My Terratec Cinergy T2 USB DVB receiver has many drop-outs under Windows, takes ages to scan channels and the tv software bundled with it crashed a lot in the past. Also, application software and drivers not being updated, so that I can't use the device under Windows 7, anymore. No such problems under Linux: The device worked out-of-the-box with Kaffeine and there are *no* crashes.

But these are no professional applications, you would use to run your business. For businesses, some software still is only available for Windows in acceptable quality. For some applications there are now cloud services available, so that the difference between operating systems diminishes, e. g. for homebanking and taxes, but this requires, that you load up your data to the cloud. Which requires you to trust the vendor, regarding data protection and safety.


gargamel