[NBLUG/talk] Printers

Alan n1al at sonic.net
Wed Mar 4 16:08:16 PST 2015


I'm fed up with inkjet printers.  If you don't use them for awhile the 
jets jam.  Invariably one color runs out before the others so you have 
to throw away perfectly good ink to get all your colors back.  And the 
usage counter makes you replace the cartridge before it's empty.

The Brother laser printers (at least the ones I have used) sense low 
toner using a light sensor looking through a window in the cartridge. 
You can fool it by putting a piece of electrical tape over the window. 
(Do that before the toner gets low.)

I bought a Canon LPB6000 ImageClass laser printer to use with my Linux 
computer.  Their web site promised that a Linux driver was available.  I 
downloaded the driver but was never able to get it to work.  It would 
install just fine, but when I tried to print nothing happened.

I Googled and discovered that apparently their Linux driver is 
defective.  I was not able to find anyone who was able to get it to work.

So I swapped printers and use the Canon on the Windows computer (where 
it works fine) and the old Brother printer on Linux.

Alan


On 03/04/2015 11:29 AM, cecrops at sandwich.net wrote:
> My mother's printer must be one of those HP models with the circuitry rigged to
> refuse to print anything after a time period and claim she is out of ink even
> though she does not use it that often, and it says the replacement cartidges she
> got in a 4-pack of replacement cartidges are all out of ink, and she's about ready
> to throw it out a window. So being the techie in the family, I'll be recommending
> and probably buying a new printer.
>
> Looking into printers is a good opportunity to get up to date on the status of
> printing protocols and Linux compatibility where I don't know anything about the
> subject other than the fact that cups replaced lpr a while ago, and zeroconf looked
> like the new network discovery standard ten years ago but everyone stopped talking
> about it.
>
> This looks like the protocols information that I was looking for.
> http://www.cups.org/documentation.php/doc-2.0/network.html
>
>
> Questions:
>
> 1. Can someone recommend a good and affordable general-purpose printer/scanner combo
> that doesn't chip the cartidges and rip you off?
>
> 2. Are there any printer vendors that are known to NOT be Linux compatibile and
> should be avoided if Linux compatibility is an issue?
>
>
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