Printer

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 9:34 AM -0500 12/28/04, Louis LeBlanc wrote:
>On 12/27/04 09:46 PM, Parv sat at the `puter and typed:
>  >
>>  Lest somebody gets the wrong idea that all Lexmark printers behave
>>  as descried above, my Optra E310 laser printer -- US$[23]00, 199[89]
>>  -- is still going strong.  It worked/works in Windows 9[58], Me, XP.
>>  It of course just works, like a PS printer, in FreeBSD 3.x, 4.x, and
>>  sure would in 5.x.
>
>Some few from that time period (very few, if I remember the weeks of
>research I wasted on my particular model) used standard protocols and
>could be easily made to work with any OS.  The majority of Lexmark
>printers up to around 2002 (I think) used a proprietary protocol, and
>they guarded it like it was Microsoft code.  I don't think they even
>released MacOS drivers.  I believe most of their printers now use
>standard drivers, but that's still no guarantee they'll work with *nix
>systems.  Some are explicitly supported through the various methods,
>but unless it was, I wouldn't even bother, myself.

Sigh.  We have a few hundred Lexmark printers here at RPI, covering
a variety of models.  We have been buying them since Lexmark was
created as a separate company (a spin-off of IBM).  They have all
worked fine, printing from a variety of systems using standard
protocols.  In our case, we tend to buy Lexmarks for black-and-white
laser printing.  We have a few of their color printers too, but we
have not been happy with the printing-results.  Which is to say, they
do *work*, but in general we weren't too happy with the color output,
compared to the output we get from Tektronix (now Xerox) Phaser
printers.

We print over two million pages a year on our various Lexmark
printers.  They seem to do just fine for us.

>  > Mind that i am interested mainly in sharp and clear black/white
>  > text currently.
>
>Which would probably be a deciding factor in changing printers.  My
>guess is you'll get another year or two with good maintennance.  I
>vaguely remember reading somewhere that those standard protocol
>printers were decent quality, but the proprietary protocol models
>were mediocre at best.  That might have been a factor in their
>abandoning it.
>
>I'm glad your experience with Lexmark has been better than mine.
>Myself, I'm pretty brand-loyal.  When something works well for me, I
>stick with it.  When a brand burns me, I avoid it like the plague
>unless circumstance forces me to take another chance.

My experience is that Lexmark is really best at the higher-end
printers, but then that's what we tend to buy here at RPI, because
we do a lot of printing.  I have never bought a cheap (< $100)
lexmark printer, but then I don't buy cheap printers from anyone.
My experience is that almost all cheap printers are more trouble
than they are worth.  I have wasted many many hours on a cheap HP,
Epson, or Canon printer that some friend of mine has bought.  I
am sure that I would have similar headaches with a cheap Lexmark,
assuming I were to buy one.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu