[GRLUG] Cheap laser printer

[Tim Schmidt]

Just to elaborate on Samsung's drivers...  the ones that shipped with
the SCX-4100 only supported redhat or debian, shipped with their own
binary lpd, require you to use Samsung's binary GUI configuration
tool, and don't support some of the features of the printer (the
highest resolution, some paper settings, etc).  I hear that they've
shipped a new driver version that at least installs in such a way that
the stock gnome printer configuration wizard can set things up for
you, but they're still proprietary, and the printer communication
protocol (deceptively refered to as S-GDI) is completely undocumented.

Not cool.

That said, most of HP's recent models have nicely working completely
free drivers, some require a firmware blob to be loaded into the
printer by hotplug, but that's not too hard to set up.  Kyocera's
models seem to be either spottily or completely un-supported (although
I have no experience with them), Konica Minolta seems to have released
enough information (including PPDs) for completely free drivers, and
my experience in the past with Lexmarks and Canons has been good.  In
short, Samsung's are some of the poorest supported printers in Free
software.  Doing some of my work from mips machines, the Free part is
_very_ important.  Anyone with a mac or other PPC machine will
sympathize.

/rant

--tim