Re: [TCLUG:6913] new printer recommendation?

[Michael Hicks <hick0088@tc.umn.edu>]

> I'm looking to buy a new printer that will work under both NT and
> Linux.  I've been looking at the HP 712c and the Epson Stylus 900.
>  Both of these printers are new and I haven't been able to find any
> specific references to them as being supported under linux.  I know
> the Epson Stylus 800 is on the printer compatibility list from rh,
> and I've read that the HP 710 works (but no color).

Looking at HP's web site, I see that 712 uses the Printing Performance
Architecture -- that makes it a WinPrinter.  There has been some work done to
get PPA printers to work in Linux, but only in b&w so far..

If you only have a choice of the two, I'd go for the Epson.  It uses (at the
very least) the ESC/P2 language (which is actually fairly well documented -- my
Epson ActionPrinter 3250 from about 5 years ago had the instruction set in the
manual).  From the Epson web page, I see that there is an option for to directly
interpret PostScript 3, so then you could potentially just dump PostScript
output directly to /dev/lp0 in Linux (whee!)

[snip]
 
> Or can someone recommend a new printer that they've had
> success with?

My own printer is an Epson Stylus Color 640 -- it works pretty well (although I
can't tweak the color balance very easily..), although the print heads sometimes
require several cleaning cycles to produce good output..

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[ Mike Hicks | http://umn.edu/~hick0088 | mailto:hick0088@tc.umn.edu ]