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New Printer?


clevedonal
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I am looking for a new printer, and drawn to the Epson R220 - apparently good quality, low running costs (with compatibles) direct CD printing, but having looked at Epson site i cannot find Linux drivers.

Q: am i likely to get top quality photo reproduction and full CD printing functionality using Mandriva powerpack 2006?

does anyone here use this this printer??

(Before i part with my hard-earned cash....)

 

as always

 

 

Thanks for input!

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I'm not quite sure what kinds of features you are looking for in a printer, but I've had alot of success with an HP Deskjet 5740. It is immediately recognized by Mandriva 2005 and 6, prints black text blazaingly fast and the color quality isn't that bad. The ink cartridges are cheap and so is the printer. They may have replaced it with a new model, but I believe the one I bought ran about 100 bucks.

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Epson supports Linux extremely well. I would be very surprised if CUPS did not have the appropiate driver for your model or a similar Epson model.

 

I just checked and the Stylus 210 is listed and I would bet there is no driver difference between the 210 and the 220.

 

Cheers. John.

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Canon has the best printers, and scant to nonexistent Linux support.

Epson has exhellent Linux support, and their printers are quite good for the price.

HP - I wouldn't bother at all... crap hardware as well as the worst customer support on planet earth. The fact they do deliver half baked Linux drivers doesn't help at all.

Verdict is, go Epson, or if you don't mind shedding some extra 30$, the Canon+ Turboprint commercial driver (checkout their compatibility list first) is a good candidate.

The choice is yours.

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Canon has the best printers, and scant to nonexistent Linux support.

Epson has exhellent Linux support, and their printers are quite good for the price.

HP - I wouldn't bother at all... crap hardware as well as the worst customer support on planet earth. The fact they do deliver half baked Linux drivers doesn't help at all.

Verdict is, go Epson, or if you don't mind shedding some extra 30$, the Canon+ Turboprint commercial driver (checkout their compatibility list first) is a good candidate.

The choice is yours.

I have to disagree here. IMHO Canon has some good printers but definitely not the best. The best printers, from a professional point of view (e.g. large-scale printing) are made by Xerox, HP and Agfa. From those, only HP has decent support for Linux.

 

Btw, I have a HP 1020 LaserJet next to this box and it works well, although the USB detection is a bit buggy (I have to upload the firmware manually after activating the printer... this sucks. But the print-result is okay).

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I've never had problems with HP or Epson both in terms of Linux support and harware reliability. What I'd suggest is that you look into cartridge costs. They quickly exceed the printer purchase price. Right now I have an HP 5940 that spits out b/w very fast and does decent color. It only cost $90.

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Many thanks to all for the input - i do find the idea of printing directly onto cds attractive, (& much better than sticky labels) and i can get a full set of 6 (count 'em) carts for R220 from Choice stationery ( http://www.choicestationery.com in the UK) for around £20 delivered.... so running costs should be ok.

i can buy also buy the printer + 5 sets of compatibles for around £80, so that should get me a chance to play with various settings...

 

i do aim to print photos up to A4, using good quality paper, so i want to be able to use all the dpi that this printer can muster....

 

Thanks to one and all - though i'll welcome addtional advice at any time of course!

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Anytime you want to see if a printer is supported by Mandriva, go to the Mandriva Control Center, Hardware and add new hardware. Then select manually install it myself and it will give you a list of all printers that are supported in Mandriva. I just bought a HP and didn't even check the model. It's so well supported I just connected it, chose add new printer, it automatically found the printer had the driver and I was up and running in less than a minute.

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I have a Canon printer, and it prints grey, not black. It's not a colour versus b+w setting, it's just the way it is.

 

Seems in this instance, Canon Can't :P

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Ianw1974,

perhaps that depends on the model/driver. I have a Cannon 4200 printer, and it prints texts pretty darn black. I set colour/saturation to -10% , and kept contrast/brightness on the standard level, could that be the trick? I noticed that MCC printer setup does not go along very well with Turboprint drivers, though. Printerdrake sets everything to print very faint (and mirrorred).

 

In general, I can only recommend the printer I have, given you are prepared to shell those extra €30 for the driver. The model I have is also rated as one of the cheapest in costs per page, among inkjet printers [available on the NL market, wrt original ink].

Edited by uralmasha
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Mine is a BJC-2100, which I think could be related to my model, plus I've only used the "free" drivers for it so far :P

 

Since it's old, I might update soon and buy a newer better one.

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I know some printers from Canon that don't work well with Linux, which is why I don't use Canon pinters at all. Scanners are a different matter, though.

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Canon + Linux = Turboprint (almost obligatory).

My Pixma i5000 works great with Turboprint, awesomely fast, exhellent quality, and also printing on CDR/DVDR is very easy (although I had to create page templates for that, and feed them to the printer via Scribus, because Turboprint does support printing from the CD tray, but does not provide any page template).

Granted that if you won a cheap printer shedding 30$ more for a linux driver is some sort of a cost, but since i5000 isn't cheap I had no trouble considering that extra $$ as part of the deal with Canon (which deal never existed...).

Edited by scarecrow
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