On Mon, 18 Jul 2005, L. Mark Stone wrote:
My Epson Stylus Color C84 is getting a little long in the tooth. I'm running 9.2 Pro and am looking for a printer YaST supports right out of the box. Both the R200 and the R300 are listed; anyone have any good or bad experiences with these printers?
I'm a little nervous because these printers seem to be USB printers, and heretofore I've always used either network or parallel printers.
I use USB on this box for UPS management and syncing with my Palm. The UPS works flawlessly, the Palm seems to utilize a random number generator when it comes to selecting which USB ports it will use, hence, my nervousness.
Thanks, Mark
P.S. Alternate printer suggestions are welcomed. I don't need super high-speed printing, but I do print enough client presentations and the like that I tend to wear out these printers every year or so. I need crystal-clear 720-dpi printing and reasonably good printing of screen shots on high-quality inkjet paper. I don't need to print real photos, scan docs, or anything else. Just a good basic color inkjet printer that's reasonably fast.
Given those requirements, I'd buy an HP. I have an Epson R300 and, although I'm very happy with it's output (esp. photos on photo paper which are stunning), I really hate printing with USB, although it generally works. When it decides to go weird, however, that's different. Also, I've had difficulty printing photo-quality from Linux. THe last thing is the driver makes a huge difference. I have an HP laserjet (an old one) and print speeds will vary by more than a factor of 10 based purely on the driver (ppd) I choose in the cups config. Only one of the three available for the Epson seemed to work at all, for me. I got garbage output with 2 of the 3, but so long as it works I guess I don't care much. Lastly, ink will KILL you, unless you buy el-cheepo ink for example from E-Bay. For basic stuff I'd honestly consider a lower end color laser, especially if you are going through these things once a year - a low end laser should last YEARS and YEARS, and be vastly less expensive to run based on consumables alone. -- Carpe diem - Seize the day. Carp in denim - There's a fish in my pants! Jon Nelson <jnelson-suse@jamponi.net>