[ale] looking for a reasonably priced color laser printer

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Wed, 2011-01-19 at 10:03 -0500, Jim Kinney wrote:
> HP does things like date stamp a toner cartridge on first use and
> refuse to use it after a certain date in the future. The claim is it
> preserves the print quality. Everyone knows it's to kill the refill
> market. They do the same thing on ink jet as well.

Ahh, well.

Another reason to use Lexmark (LASER! ONLY! NEVER INKJET!) printers, I
guess.  I have been very happy with their line of laser printers, and I
obtain my cartridges from Office Supply Outfitters, which are available
at an excellent price as well as yield more output than the Lexmark
official ones.

In case this happens to be a random thing that someone lands on in the
archives, I'll explain my all-caps comment above.

Lexmark inkjet printers suck.  For starters, they're ink jets, and it
only gets worse from there.  They almost never use the same language
between printer models, some of them use a GDI-based (host-driven)
driver setup, others actually have a reasonable language, and other
still do something completely different.  It's not worth the time or the
money, and that's saying a lot since they are usually very inexpensive
(but they're cheap, too).

However, Lexmark laser printers are typically wonderful, IME.  They
nearly universally support PostScript, and the ones that do not support
PostScript at least support PCL 5 or PCL 6 (aka PCL-XL).  The one that I
have (an E250dn) is networked and supports duplexing.  The one that I
had previously (an E240) was not networked, and did not support
duplexing, and did not support PostScript (just PCL).  It was wonderful,
too, but I got this new one for the ability to print on both sides of
the page.

In my own opinion, it is *quite* important to have a printer that
supports PostScript or PCL.  The reason for that is that (nearly) every
computer program made in the last almost 30 years (boy am I getting old)
supports PostScript, and programs that support PCL go back almost as
far.  I still have old DOS programs that can print to my new-fangled
printer just fine, because my printer supports both PS and PCL.  I
frequently tell people that the number one reason that they want a
printer that does one or the other (but preferably both) is that it is
almost guaranteed to be supported out-of-the-box.  Yes, there are custom
drivers available, but they're completely unnecessary.  If I can't use
one of the generic drivers, it's not good enough and I don't want it.

(That said, office printers like the Canon ImageRunner series work just
fine with generic PostScript drivers, but if you pull the PPD for them
from the OS X drivers, you can get the stapling goodness combined with
the duplexing of the printer for free.  CUPS supports it as long as the
PPD file does, it appears.)

Perhaps my point of view is one of sheer laziness: you simply cannot go
wrong with a printer that speaks a standard page description language.
It will work on all operating systems that know how to print (and even
some that do not with the aid of something like Ghostscript to convert
things to PostScript) on all architectures.  PS and PCL do require
slightly more expensive printers in terms of electronics and memory
consumption and all of that, but you simply cannot go wrong with them.
Anything that _requires_ a driver from the vendor is going to be limited
in some way.

A tangent:  it is a shame that we don't have standard interfaces defined
for all sorts of hardware.  USB comes close.  If I recall correctly,
AHCI also defines a standard interface (though it's unstable still in a
lot of chipsets, IME).  But seriously, sound cards, video cards, disk
controllers, memory controllers, extension buses, printers, etc., etc.,
should provide universal interfaces.  What'd be the benefit of that.  Oh
em gee, operating systems would become simpler and smaller!  Sigh.

All right, I suppose I am done ranting now.

	--- Mike
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