Report on printer compatibility with Linux as experienced today.

I won't bore everyone with all the details (but I will mention this 
whole exercise took many hours of research, plus 2 trips to 3 different 
stores, and the purchase and return of a printer that didn't do fax as I 
wanted), but, I was in the market for a printer to replace my HP color 
laser all-in-one.


Why would I replace a really nice HP Color LaserJet?  Well, it 
apparently decided that it wouldn't print well any more with non-HP 
carts, and buying a full set of the silly things was in the neighborhood 
of $300 or more, IIRC.  (Oh, and the HP instant ink program, which 
looked like a pretty good deal, is ONLY for inkjet printers!)


So, I figured I could spend $300 for genuine HP and HOPE it made the 
printer happy, or punt and get a new printer.  I went the latter route.


After 'much'-ish research, I decided I'd go for a Brother Color Laser 
All-In-One (we require Fax, don't ask why ;-), since Brothers are 
reputed to be excellently-supported on Linux.


Found the best price anywhere (the local Staples, believe it or not!) 
and was about to plunk down my card to get it when I realized it was 
going to be around $750 or so for the printer ($400-ish?) and genuine 
Brother carts ($350-ish  - sound similar to the HP prices? yeah.).


Woah! Ouch!  Hey, I'm retired now, that's kinda a shock.  Back up, 
regroup, decide to try out the EcoTank idea, something I'd seriously 
considered in the past.  Picked an Epson (ET-4800, for like $269 at - 
believe it or not - WalMart (I'm skipping the first purchase which I had 
to return - no fax)), brought it home.


Interesting setup method.  I downloaded the Epson printer setup app on 
to my Android.  All went very well until I tried to enter my WIFI 
password.  (First off, it doesn't look like the ET-4800 does 5GHz Wifi, 
only 2.4, so I had to switch my phone over to the 2.4 side. This might 
be an 'issue' with more than my 4800, so beware).  I tried it 4 or 5 
times, never got it to work (and the app was very weird - in order to 
re-enter your WiFI password you had to tell it you had done it, then it 
would give you the 'enter password' dialog.  Otherwise it was in an 
infinite loop saying it couldn't see the printer yet, did you enter the 
password correctly, did you do it right).

Anyway, after the ink was 'charged', I went to the front panel and 
connected to wifi (just fine, thank you very much, on the first try), 
then suddenly the app saw it and all was well.

My son has Apple stuff and was pretty much immediately able to print.

I went to Epson and looked up Linux print support, downloaded the 
appropriate (in my case) .deb file, installed it and the 
epsonscan2-bundle, fired up my 'Printers' tool, and there it was. I 
didn't even have to search/destroy um, I mean search/install.

Select it, say print test page, immediate print success.


On my wife's Linux machine I tried running their 'epsonscan2' program 
and was not impressed.  It didn't find the scanner.  So, I ran over to 
XSane and simple-scan and both could see it with no problem. I used 
XSane to scan in both BW and color, no problems. Oh, and it knew to let 
me choose the ADF or the flatbed!

At first I thought it didn't have extreme scan resolution, then I 
fiddled in simple-scan and set it to 1200 - whoa! But very slow.

(In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm having a weird problem getting 
scanning to work on my computer, but it works perfectly on my wife's...)

When I did all the above stuff with my HP (long ago in a galaxy far 
away), it worked, but I seem to recall that getting the scanning to work 
was a little more of an issue.


On the other hand, I have a much older Epson (from an even longer time 
ago and an even further away galaxy!) that I did have issues with 
finding and setting up, so it looks to me like Epson has improved a lot.


Haven't printed much yet, but so far so good.


All the above to say that Epson's Linux support worked quite well for 
me  this time.  Linux is Linux Mint 20.2.

Anybody want to buy an unhappy HP Color LaserJet MFP M281cdw? ;-)

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