printer compatibility sparsity. [SOLVED]

Snurg;
What you say makes a lot of sense. I hadn't hitherto really considered the refurbished area. Thank you for awakening me to that possibility.
 
tingo said:
You said;
Also, it is 2021, how much dead tree printouts do you need? Most of it can probably be printed to file (PDF or postscript or other format at your choice) and carried with you.
Click to expand...
I am retired so my needs are not in the way of a business volume, but your above comment is nevertheless a sensible comment on the need for responsible conservation. Thanks.
 
I never liked the idea of installing a printer on Unix/Linux, it always seemed like a large confusing abyss of configuration and compatibility issues.

Then I found hplip on Linux and thought my problems were solved. I spent several years with the HP p1606dn on Debian. Then I migrated to FreeBSD and hplip always complained about plugins, I spent many hours lost. Then one day I found out that this printer also supports PCL6.

Whomp. No more problems. Just install a generic pcl6 driver through cups and done, less than 3 minutes of config [the quality really is the same as with the proprietary driver on Windows].*

To make a long story short, always make sure it supports PCL or PostScript before purchasing [they don't always advertise it]. I don't think that professional grade printers are particularly expensive, nearly any printer can be had for less than 100 dollars nowadays [just get one that's two or three years old].

* HP does not like when the consumer uses generic toner/ink. They don't appear to care about generic drivers. I found that the firmware intentionally bastardizes generic toner quality with a darker line down the center from top to bottom.

** Given the quality of used computer equipment, it doesn't make any particular sense to purchase new when used office equipment is nearly the same quality and less than half the cost [also better for the environment, etc, sort of like an off-lease mini cooper, it's way cheaper and the same quality].
 
tingo said:
Printer manufacturers (for the home market at least) earn a living by selling ink, not printers. The printer market is very mature, which means that all the players (= printer vendors) have a working business plan; no need to change anything, they just need to milk this cow as long as they can. Doing anything new, like caring for a possible new target group of buyers (= unix & linux community)? Not interesting, doesn't provide any projected extra income.
Click to expand...
Ink has some drawbacks anyways. I'd consider it a typical "home" technology. There's a niche (photography) where it excells, but for your typical business use, you always want a laser printer, mainly because it "just works". That said, I think you're perfectly correct with your assessment, at least when looking at the "home" market. There's a reason any "expensive" printer for business use understands postscript, because in these environments, you can't sell anything that needs a "driver" on any terminal device.
 
Snurg said:
dalpets
You wrote you are from Australia.
I do not know the market situation there. Is no refurbished hardware available?

I bought my Kyocera printer (actually 2, each 30 euros, one stashed away as backup) from a commercial refurbisher.
Yes, they were 3,4 years old, had already ~20k, 30k pages printed. But that is nothing for a business class printer with a drum life of 100k pages.
Print is fast (up to 20 pages/min), duplex, multiple cartridges, 500-1000 pages each, Postscript, Ethernet, supports even LPR.

Personally, I fail to understand why you insist in buying a new low-end printer for much money, instead of taking a highend business-grade printer that has a little bit of use but works perfectly for almost no money.
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There's always ebay.
You make very valid points. Many years ago I bought an old hp2300dn and it worked flawlessly until I no longer needed it. I got it out recently, and after a shake of the toner and a bit of a cleanup it works. So, overall a good investment.
 
dalpets said:
I am retired so my needs are not in the way of a business volume, but your above comment is nevertheless a sensible comment on the need for responsible conservation. Thanks.
Click to expand...
You do not mention some critical points:
Do you require colour printing?
Do you require duplex printing?
Do you require network printing or want usb printing?
Do you really need a scanner incorporated in the printer?

These all determine your ultimate cost.

BTW, I am not a fan of inkjet anythings.They are designed to capture the user and extort them with high prices and built-in failure. A lot of these are cheaper to throw out and buy again rather than buy the inks for them. It's criminal waste.

Compare this to, say, laser printers. Most you can purchase non-genuine toner for at greatly discounted prices. Add to that they are built to last not to be obsolete once the toner runs out, and I know where my dollars would go.
 
LaserJets are perfect for rough drafts and mundane printing needs, but if you ever thought about printing book signatures for bookbinding [use texlive it's easy] or printing giclee photographs/paintings you would need an inkjet [just think you can decorate your whole house for just the cost of the canvas and it looks like a real painting].

I like my laserjet, but it isn't a whole printing solution. Inkjets/tankjets are far better quality for specific hobby type activities [btw you can use an inkjet to print a picture on wax paper then transfer it to wood, etc for an old timey wood painted style sign].

* That's right, FreeBSD is for art lovers too!

Print this out and put it over your fireplace. No one would know it didn't cost you anything except the canvas.

Ever want a leather-bound copy of the FreeBSD handbook with marbled end-papers?
Just make one with cotton rag paper, gold leaf, and tooling.
 
The printer situation on free Unixes is theoretically awful, as you discovered: it's really hard to find a printer that you buy new, and where you can be 100% sure that it will be supported. The reason is that (a) vendors are not interested in putting in any effort for officially supporting the *BSDs, since the market is SOO small, and (b) *BSDs don't have much professional software engineering staff, so things like printer compatibility is done by a small number of volunteers, who have only a very limited set of printers.

On the other hand: the real practical situation is fine: any reasonably common printer will work. My suggestion would be: Buy nearly any used HP LaserJet. I've been using a LJ5mp (parallel port, 6ppm, black/white, Postscript) for the last 25 years (bought it in 1995, when job hunting after leaving academic jobs, to print resumes). It had to get repaired once, when our 2-year old decided to climb on it. In the meantime, we have added two more LaserJets, one double-sided fast one (20 ppm), which was needed when we were volunteering (it can print 1000 invitations to a charity ball in an evening, and the next day you stuff them all into envelopes), and a color one (was very useful when our kid was in high school, for big project reports). But the 25-year old one is still doing excellently; I just printed our annual tax forms on it a moment ago.

The best thing is that laser printers have very low operating costs. And if you can find used toner cartridges, they become free to operate. I used to work in a big office building, and lots of people had printers of that generation as personal printers in their office. Whenever someone quit or retired, I used to go dumpster diving, and pull half-full toner cartridges out of the trash.

I've never set up CUPS on FreeBSD (my FreeBSD machine at home is just a server), and on my current install, I don't even have print filters set up to print from it directly. But I used to use CUPS on Linux desktop machines, and had no problem with printers. And any common big-name postscript printer will be supported and work fine.

Disclaimer: I'm biased towards HP printers, because I worked at HP for a few years. Strangely, I never bought an HP printer while an HP employee: My first one was much earlier (it actually printed the resume used to apply for a job at HP), and the the newer ones came much later, when I was working at IBM.
 
mark_j said:
BTW, I am not a fan of inkjet anythings.They are designed to capture the user and extort them with high prices and built-in failure. A lot of these are cheaper to throw out and buy again rather than buy the inks for them. It's criminal waste.
Click to expand...
Me neither.
My printing demand is not constant. There are regular pauses.
For this reason, I regularly had to throw away almost-full ink cartridges only because the small jets were so thoroughly clogged by dried hard ink matter, that even putting into water overnight and pressure spraying didn't help make them usable again.
Not at all ecologically or economically acceptable.

This problem made me switch to using refurbished laser printers.
I used a few PCL printers, but the hassle (ghostscript etc) is not worth saving the small extra cost of buying a real (e.g. Postscript) printer.

When buying refurbished laser printers, look at the drum usage count and the remaining fill percentage of the toner cartridges.
The less the drum has been used the cleaner is the print when printing color gloss mode, for example.
Also grab extra paper cartridges (here the cost for one is ~10,15 euros) so you do not need to jerk around with different sorts of paper, just choose the feed from the print dialog.

Another point to consider is choosing a printer designed for high throughput. Hidden in the data sheets you can find how much pages monthly is the maximum advisable printing volume. A printer that is designed for, say, 10000 pages/month is way less likely to jam than a home-office-grade printer. With my Laserjets I rarely managed to print >100 pages without jam, this is why I prefer the Kyoceras which do rarely jam even when printing duplex.

Also look at the remaining toner... it's a nice extra when you get thousands pages worth of original toner with the printer.
 
Snurg said:
I used a few PCL printers, but the hassle (ghostscript etc) is not worth saving the small extra cost of buying a real (e.g. Postscript) printer.
Click to expand...
The only problem with that is not all printer manufacturers advertise PCL or PostScript.

Sometimes the only way to find out is to dig through the manual, which makes the search process more tedious. Perhaps if I limited the search strictly to professional printers I would have better luck.

To use the 1606dn as an example: Amazon.com has it but says nothing about PCL or PostScript. The only way to find out what it supports is to look in the manual where it says it supports PCL5e.

So if your objective is to find a real PostScript printer how do you start? The inclination is to find a printer you want, then discover whether it supports PostScript or not by digging in the manual.
 
Well you'd reckon on most HP printers using PCL, after all they own the technology.

As I stated previously, a good indication of support for postscript is if they provide Mac OSX drivers, because then they're PPD, so it's postscript. Unfortunately, unless it's a non-business printer (marketed to that clientele) then there are less chances it will be usable on FreeBSD. I guess it comes down to a license fee for postscript to Adobe (if their other products are anything to go by they probably charge like a wounded bull for it!)
 
BostonBSD said:
The only problem with that is not all printer manufacturers advertise PCL or PostScript. [...]

So if your objective is to find a real PostScript printer how do you start?
Click to expand...
Yes, by limiting the search to professional printers offered as network printers for businesses, departments etc.
Just adding "duplex" as search criterion kicks out almost all non-professional printers from the search results in printer sites.
Of the remaining printers, practically all have Postscript.

Just make sure you don't forget to check the specs.
Specs for professional printers are easy to find, as printer makers want to convince the buyer the printer suits their needs. Consumer grade printers are being sold rather by initial low price (which has costs that don't look nice in spec sheets, so these are not as detailed as with business printers).

If you clearly prefer some manufacturer, you might use its naming scheme. For example, I just searched ebay "Kyocera FS-5", showing me their high-performance business color laser printers being offered.
 
I've used some Epson ESC/P-R based printer with Linux and BSD. With print/epson-inkjet-printer-escpr. You can find here the models that are compatible with this driver.
My XP-55 work very well with RJ45 and USB on my FreeBSD workstation.
 
A couple of years ago I bought an Epson ET2750 combination. The printing worked fine (via USB or printer on network via WiFi) with CUPS and gutenprint. Over the weekend (after upgrading to 12.4) I tried to get the scanner part working via USB but no success. Then came across https://github.com/alexpevzner/sane-airscan.
Code: 
git clone https://github.com/alexpevzner/sane-airscan.git
cd sane-airscan
# edit Makefile to change gcc to gcc9 (which I happen to have installed)
gmake
sudo gmake install

Edited /usr/local/etc/sane.d/airscan.conf because out of box it black listed the subnet I use

Code: 
ip    = 192.168.0.0/24 ; blacklist the whole subnet

Added airscan to /usr/local/etc/sane.d/dll.conf
and can now scan!

The installation is not quite right for FreeBSD but should be trivial to make into a conforming Port.
If I get some time this week I will try to do this.

I am very happy with the ET-2750 with its EcoTank inks (hardly used any), the duplexing, print quality including photo paper.
The LCD is a bit small but thats really the only negative.
 
shepper said:
Are you referring to the ljet4 (PCL5) driver in ghostscript. The HL-L2350 does not support PCLx.
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Sorry, It seems i mixed the 23xx up with the 32xx printers.

I'm back at work today and having a look at my cluttered CUPS config. It seems I never bothered changing the drivers for the 2350 printers as they are all still configured (and working) with the 2250 gutenprint driver.

The MFC-7360Ns are working with the LaserJet PCL4/5 printers, so do the HL-L5100DN and various HL-L3230/70 printers, altough they both also support BR-script. I have some configured with BR-Script drivers, some with LaserJet and one of the 3230 with "Brother HL-L3230CDW CUPS" driver. I suspect that's the one with the ppd from an OSX driver package; can't remember though why I used that driver for that particular printer.
As said - my cups config is pretty much cluttered as it was dragged along for almost 10 years now and if a replacement (successor model) worked with the old driver I usually didn't bother changing it. But because brother printers don't seem to be particularly picky, they work with various drivers.

Nice thing about the brother printers for home use: there are a bunch of cheap, working aftermarket toners available. For typical home use I don't think it matters if the printer lives for 800k pages or only 750k as you'd never reach that numbers anyways. I still have an old HL-2050 at home that still chugs along after over 15 years...

I haven't seen it mentioned in this thread, but www.openprinting.org is always a good source for drivers and compatibility information. As long as you have a standard ppd driver and/or it only requires a simple perl-based filter, every printer that works on Linux and Mac also works on FreeBSD (all are using CUPS...).
 
I think I may have stumbled on a refurbished HP monochrome laser Jet printer in the LaserJet pro400 (M401DN) that might suit my needs, given it says that it has connectivity with Unix @ https://www8.hp.com/au/en/pdf/HP_Single_FunctionPrinter_Product_line_up_tcm_184_1233106.pdf
(5th column from the left)
The reason I choose interest in this one, notwithstanding Zirias's above advised preferences for postcript and/or PCL is that I simply can't find resources with that degree of granularity. This is a lower tier machine that doesn't have a monster office footprint & that is definitely my preference. It also has 3rd party toner availability here in OZ & that is a bonus.
How would I follow up the claim that this printer is Unix compatible or might you know of a specific resource for a unix driver? Is there a unix/linux driver built into the machine? I don't know!
Thanks.

1615214475750.png
 
dalpets said:
How would I follow up the claim that this printer is Unix compatible or might you know of a specific resource for a unix driver?
Click to expand...
Never had problems with HPs using PCL.
The only (sometimes yucky) thing is setting up the filter (ghostscript); with postscript printers you can just skip this step.

No extra drivers or the like.
 
Just looked it up: The HP M401DN speaks PCL and Postscript. All HP lasers do PCL, and since ~2000 nearly all also do Postscript. At that point, it will be compatible with CUPS, and will not need "drivers", all CUPS needs to do is to convert stuff to PCL or Postscript.

Go for it!
 
shepper said:
Actually, this is not strictly true. Some of HP's cheaper LaserJets use ZjStream:
Click to expand...
Wow, color me surprised: A HP LaserJet that doesn't print using PCL. Wouldn't have expected that. I bet there are a few bodies spinning in their grave in Palo Alto, but we knew that.
 
HP used to have great inhouse R&D, now they just try to corner the market and sell ink.
I don't think this was due to HP engineers being out competed. Rather they were viewed as an expense that cut into Shareholder value and CEO bonuses. Carly Fiorina, a marketer, thought R&D could be outsourced or bought outright.
HP buys Samsung's printer division
 
dalpets said:
I think I may have stumbled on a refurbished HP monochrome laser Jet printer in the LaserJet pro400 (M401DN) that might suit my needs
Click to expand...
The "driver" is not the issue. The cups(1) compatibility is. That compatibility is dependent on a ppd file for your specific printer being available for use with cups(1).

HP have a ppd file named hp-laserjet_400_m401-ps.ppd for it. It's in the HPLIP tar package.

But you don't need that, as its also available in the FreeBSD print/hplip port or package (I think the package first became available on FreeBSD 12):
Code: 
$ grep m401-ps.ppd /usr/ports/print/hplip/pkg-plist
share/ppd/HP/hp-laserjet_400_m401-ps.ppd.gz
To install the M401dn ppd file:
Code: 
# As root
pkg install hplip
# or if the pkg is not available
cd /usr/ports/print/hplip/; make install && make clean
The install and configure cups(1):
Code: 
# As root
pkg install cups
# point a web browser at http://127.0.0.1:631
 
mark J;
You do not mention some critical points:
Do you require color printing?.............................................................no
Do you require duplex printing?.........................................................yes
Do you require network printing or want usb printing?............usb
Do you really need a scanner incorporated in the printer?.....not essential.
 
So it seems your selected printer fits the bill. If you decide later on a scanner, then for me Epson is the best price per usability, features and compatibility (at least in my experience).
 

gpw928;​

There's another driver , yes another one *!#.^@

Driver - HP LaserJet Pro 400 Printer M401dn | HP® Customer Support

support.hp.com support.hp.com

Do you still think the ppd option is the best route?

Your post comes closest to helping me untangle this maze, of now 3 options, which is confusing to the uninitiated (me). There always seems to be inexhaustible options around the corner with this stuff, that just when you think you have all the bases covered you are abruptly disabused.

And then there is the terrifying complexity (to me) of the 'Advanced printer setup'( section 9.4 of the handbook}, ie., unless you are a masochist or want to make printers your sole mission in life :)
I think I'll go for this refurb.
Thanks for your help.
 
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