[GRLUG] Printers

[Tim Schmidt]

On Tue, Mar 25, 2008 at 5:13 PM, Jordan Hudson <jodanlime at gmail.com> wrote:
> I have never personally owned a brother, but I am not a fan of 2 part
> cartridge systems generally, and the drums are a little costly, you should
> factor that into the cost per page. Also, I was merely speaking from the
> return amount we get, its usually more on brother machines. That being said,
> the 5250 printers have had less returns than all other brother printers we
> have stocked in the last 2 years. I own a samsung ML2010 and have not had a
> problem, works with any OS and cost per page is 2.5 cents, with the samsung
> or less with a generic cartridge.

I was worried about the two cartridges at first.  In practice, it
means refilling the toner cartridge amounts to cutting a sticker and
pulling a cap out of a dumb piece of plastic with no moving parts, and
the drum has lasted far longer than Brother recommends they be used
for (resetting the page count on the drum is a simple button-press on
the printer).  I've done the math, and I'm getting MUCH cheaper pages
than even generic refilled cartridges.

As far as the Samsungs go, I've got a family member with a Samsung
SCX-4100 and it's a nightmare under Linux - despite the cute penguin
on the box.  Binary drivers that replace system binaries with SUID
deity-knows-what and barely work on anything newer than Debian 2.2 or
RH 5.2.  Horrendous.

HP has some low-cost lasers that require computer-side magic to upload
firmware blobs to the printer to get them to function.  Not sure how
automatic that is these days, but when I had to set up a Laserjet
1012(?) it was pretty nasty.

--tim