Time for a laser printer?

I'm thinking about buying a laser printer as a complement to my ink printer. The reason is that laser printers costs less per printed page. I'm only interested in a black and white printer and will still use my ink printer for color prints.

I have invested some time to look around among the cheapest printers for a around €100. All manufactures ships their printers with a toner filled to something between 25% and 50% of what a new toner includes. An a new toner costs close to the same as a the printer. The smallest difference between a new toner and the printer was about €10. That is ridiculous. So far I have found one manufacture that ships a full toner cassette with new printers ant that is Canon.

Unfortunately Canon is not the best supplier to support Linux and Ubuntu with printer drivers. Linux printing database list the Canon LBP 2900 as not supported. But in mater of fact Canon say they support Linux to this printer. So who is telling the truth? After some googling I have found that yes the printer works with Linux but not too well. A special daemon need to be installed and it requires restart once in a while. It is not an out of the box working printer, there is a long installation instruction on the Ubuntu wiki.

Canon, why can't you deliver a proper driver that can be included with CUPS? If you had done that, my choice have been obvious.

Normally I am quite happy buying HP printers. For some reason their new bottom line laser printers does not support Linux officially. HP have for some years been the manufacture to support Linux best, why stop now? And why do HP only ships a toner cassette with 50% of toner compared to a replacement cassette.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Check out samsung. But don't use their installation program, just install the PPD that ships on the CD.

I run one B/W at home, see http://efod.se/blog/archive/2006/10/18/first-impression---samsung-ml-2571n-bw-laser-printer/, and a colour Samsung laser at work. The latter seems to have some bug in its IPP implementation, but apart from that, things run smooth.
January 31, 2008 at 7:55 PM
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