Duplex printer advice
Warren Block
wblock at wonkity.com
Tue Jun 3 02:58:31 UTC 2008
On Mon, 2 Jun 2008, Wojciech Puchar wrote:
>> Color laser is what you want. There are some really
>> good inexpensive units out there. I recall reading the
>> inexpensieve Samsung color laser even speaks Postscript.
>
> while i don't use color printers, usually this postscript is disadventage. if
> there is a choice like in HP laserjets - switching to PCL and using
> ghostscript works MUCH faster giving same results.
This depends a lot on your print jobs. Low quality machine-generated
PostScript output can be slow. PCL can also be slow. The only way to
really know is to benchmark with your print jobs.
There's also the potential overhead of the print processing systems.
Just sending PS in the first place may be quicker than apsfilter or
CUPS. Enscript is versatile for converting text.
> your computer's CPU is much faster than printer's.
It depends a lot on which printer and which computer are being compared.
Recent printers have fast RISC CPUs and fast PS interpreters. I/O speed
comes into it, too. FreeBSD seems particularly slow over parallel and
USB ports; Ethernet is fine.
> HP LaserJet 4 and 3 is excellent, anything newer - crap, as HP joined others
> in making craps so every year user has to buy new one.
I disagree. The LaserJet 4050, for example, is better than the LJ4 in
every way possible.
The trick is to avoid low-end HP models. The good ones are the ones
built for business use (like the LJ4050, and--it its time--the LJ4).
They can be found used for the same or less than new low-end versions:
http://www.wonkity.com/~wblock/docs/usedlasers.pdf
-Warren Block * Rapid City, South Dakota USA
More information about the freebsd-questions
mailing list