[H-GEN] Laser Printer

[R&J Stuart]

David Jericho wrote:
> Jason Parker-Burlingham wrote:
> 
>> Tim Browne <dugb at netspace.net.au> writes:
>>
>>> I am looking to purchase a new cheap (up to $500) laser printer to run
>>> a Linux cups box.
> 
> When an employer asks me what printer to buy for the office I'll usually 
> walk in chanting "HP", and walk out chanting "HP". I've had the 
> misfortune of working with Xerox, Oki, Minolta, Lexmark, IBM, Canon, and 
> a whole range of others. The only printer brand that has never caused me 
> grief is HP.

I've used relatively few, but I would go for either HP or Oce.  Oce tend to 
be higher volume printers...  For business use (not what was originally 
asked for) I would always require a networked printer that would talk 
lpr/lpd and postscript.

>> It has built-in PostScript support (yes I know not everyone thinks that's 
>> great.  I do.).
> 
> People always underestimate the importance of a good Postscript engine 
> in a printer. I never buy a printer without Postscript in an office. No 
> matter how crudy the OS or how obscure and insane the printer 
> configurations are, nearly everything can feed Postscript to a printer.

I agree completely with the above, but beware that many printers will NOT 
have true postscript but either have a poor postscript engine in the printer 
firmware, or worse still, pretend to do postscript, but really transfer a 
large binary image to the printer.  Avoid these at all (often high) costs.

In my previous job we purchased a 60 A4 image per minute printer that 
supposedly did postscript for a tidy sum (of the order of 50K), and got the 
postscript option.  We later found out that this was the postscript engine 
that the vendor had written which would only sometimes accept postscript 
from even its own drivers....  You could not send this printer postscript 
from say linux and expect it to just work.  The alternative was another $4 - 
5 K extra which had a real postscript engine in it.

I have heard mention a few times that HP printers only emulate postscript 
and convert to PCL.  This may be true, but I have yet to have trouble 
printing postscript accurately to a office HP printer (HP 4M or above 
equivalents).

Robert