Printer advice

[Peter Flynn]

On 20/07/2023 19:49, Robert Heller wrote:
[...]
> Ink Jet printers are generally crap. 

It depends what you use them for. I need four-colour calibrated drafts 
for my clients, usually A4 pages printed on A3 so that the crop marks 
are visible. I can't afford a 4-colour A3 double-sided laser printer, so 
an A3 inkjet for which I can perform colour calibration on specific 
substrates is fine for me. I also need reliable registration and feed 
for 2-sided drafts; HP isn't perfect but it's close enough. But in 
general, yes, the quality of inkjet manufacture is indeed crap.

> HP *used* to make quite decent *Laser* printers.  

They did indeed. When we took delivery of our first Laserjet way back 
when, we were struggling to extract it from the expanded polystyrene 
wedges that held it in the box, and at some stage everyone let go of 
their bit and we dropped the whole thing about 90cm onto a concrete 
floor. When the cussing and blaming subsided, we plugged it in, unbent 
the one paper guide that seemed to have been a casualty, and it worked 
perfectly for the next decade.

> a Lexmark color laser printer available from Amazon for $226.

What Gene said.

> Inkjets can be a bitch to get working under Linux (even/esp HP).

Used to be. Last time I had a problem installing one was probably in the 
1990s or early 2000s. If you buy a common brand, and not something 
released last week, Linux will just recognise it and that's it. But 
definitely if you go buying some discount-store own-brand unlabelled 
stuff with no indication of what it is or how it works, it will be 
harder to get working.

P