Printer Recommendation

[Alan Dayley]

Richard Wilson said:
> All,
>
> I am looking to replace my Epson CX5400 All in one (printer -- scanner
> -- copier, no fax) with something similar and having now had bad
> experiences with both Canon and Epson was wondering what people would
> recommend.

Based on my experience over the years both at home and in the workplace.

- Every all-in-one I have owned or dealt with was a headache for some
reason.  I don't know if it is the complexity or what but I no longer
recommend them to anyone.  YMMV.
-- Therefore, if you need to scan stuff, get a scanner.  If you need to
fax stuff, get a fax machine.

- If you do a lot of black and white printing, get a laser printer for
that.  Used laser or LED "laser" printers are fairly inexpensive and the
per-page print cost is usually cheaper than ink jet.

I own an Epson and a Canon because:
- Both:
-- Print head is separate from the ink cartridge.  This means that the ink
is < $10 purchased online (extracartridges.com).  I don't do refills but
I'll buy them.
- Epson:
-- Cheap at about $50
-- Great Linux driver support
-- Good printing results
- Canon:
-- Wife (photographer) loves the brand
-- Excellent printing results
-- The Canon print head can be removed and cleaned.  Have not had to do it
yet (2 years) but it is there if I need to.

The negative about the Canon is that the Free Software driver for it
doesn't use the full resolution of the printer.  I held my nose and bought
a license for the closed source Turboprint driver
(http://www.turboprint.info/) which works very well with excellent support
from the vendor[1].  (My wife just had to have a Canon printer to match
her cameras.  I would have purchased a high quality Epson because I knew
the Canon driver would be a problem.)

> I do have another printer (Xerox PE16) for which there are only Windows
> drivers.  Is there an easy way in Samba (or some other tool) to make it
> available to Linux?

Don't have an answer for you here.  Check http://linuxprinting.org/ for
possible help and leads.

Alan

[1] When we had to reinstall from hard drive corruption caused by bad RAM,
we could not find our license key code for the driver.  They sent us the
key again, no questions asked, via email within two hours of the request. 
(I hate license keys anyway but at least they were very reasonable about
it.)