On 02-Nov-01 Cliff Sarginson wrote:
Hello, I am trying to find a laser printer that will work without *any* problem on Suse, and speaks Postscript, or rather can be spoken to directly in postscript :) Speed is not that important, cheapness is. I thought I had just found a reasonable priced HP Model, but .. alas .. it is a frigging windows printer (this is even hitting the laser world now).
Cheap, reliable, preferably does not pollute my space with Ozone too much..
I've been using a Brother HL-1070 for a couple of years
and, mainly, it has worked very well. I paid about 300 GBP
(about US$ 450) for it.
This model has built-in "BrotherScript" which is a close
(but not unfortunately exact) emulation of true PostScript
Level 2.
In particular, the fonts are slightly different -- though
you wouldn't notice unless you looked closely. (It also has
some PS fonts of its own built in, but I hardly ever use
these). The printer recognises the names of the standard
Adobe PS fonts, and produces a very close approximation to
what you would expect.
It also does HPLJ-6P, Epson FX-850 and IBM Proprinter
emulations.
It prints up to 10 pages/minute, replacement toner is quite
cheap, etc.
I beefed it up by adding the max 32MB to its default 4MB,
so mostly there is no problem printing complex graphics.
However, occasionally a complex graphics page will cause
the printer to "crash" -- you get a stream of pages printed
each bearing a PostScript error message; and this shouldn't
happen because the PS being printed is valid; it seems that
there are some extreme things the PS emulation doesn't
cope with; I suspect internal buffer overflow.
It seems Brother has produced later models which also
have PS emulation, though I have no experience of these.
I hope this helps!
Ted.
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E-Mail: (Ted Harding)