Date: Sat, 26 Feb 2005 03:29:01 -0800 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Roland Smith" <rsmith@xs4all.nl> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: RE: Lexmark X1100 printer Message-ID: <LOBBIFDAGNMAMLGJJCKNIEIKFAAA.tedm@toybox.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <20050225200315.GB83200@slackbox.xs4all.nl>
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> -----Original Message----- > From: owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org > [mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@freebsd.org]On Behalf Of Roland Smith > Sent: Friday, February 25, 2005 12:03 PM > To: Ted Mittelstaedt > Cc: Gerry Freymann; freebsd-questions@freebsd.org > Subject: Re: Lexmark X1100 printer > > > On Thu, Feb 24, 2005 at 10:53:01PM -0800, Ted Mittelstaedt wrote: > > > The problem is that the cheap color inkjets on the market are all > > winprinters these days. So you have to go there if you want to print > > color. > > Over the years I've had a couple of inkjet printers, starting with a > Deskjet 500. All of them had trouble with ink cartridges drying out > after a couple of weeks non-use. This is a thing of the past with the new Epson inkjets that use the durabrite ink. > And with that ink being rediculously > expensive, I decided not to bother with inktjets anymore. I had a > Laserjet 5L for about 6 years, I think. It was still on the > original toner > cassette when I gave it to a friend. > Those are rated something around 5000 prints. I go through that in a year and a half on my HP 4+ > Another department of a company I used to work for designed and > manufactured parts for (consumer) inkjet printers for HP and > others. According to the people who worked there, those printers were > definitely not engineered to last. > This really depends on the printer. If your talking the HP Deskjets 5xx that whole 5xx model line - then yes. If your talking the earlier Epson ESC printers, then no. The big problem with those in fact was that they were designed to be used in business that was printing all the time and without enough printing they would dry up, and if that happened since the print head was separate from the ink, it would ruin the printer. But, they worked forever as long as you kept them printing. This also wasn't true for the HP deskjet 1600 as that was also an industrial printer - it took HP printserver cards, and also came with a postscript option. Today though things have changed a lot - HP and the other printer manufacturers have definite lines that are business and that are consumer, and inkjets are in both lines. > As for winprinters, I decided not to buy any printer if it > doesn't understand > postscript. Life's too short to go hunting after obscure drivers. > To all my other FreeBSD systems, the Epson C84 IS a color Postscript printer. It's only a winprinter to the FreeBSD system that is doing the conversion from Postscript to Epsonspeak. > And color laserprinters are coming down in price. I recently bought a > Color Laserjet 2550L for ¤ 439,-. Installing it amounted to feeding the > ppd file to CUPS. And it works every time. The colour output might not > be up to six-colour inkjet with special photo paper, but It Works For > Me. If it lasts as long and trouble-free as my old 6L, I consider it > money well-spent. That's a 600 dpi print engine. And the 5000 page print at 5% for each cartridge means 250 pages at 100% coverage per cartridge. Thus, if your thinking of printing pictures - forget it. You might get 500-1000 pages of pictures then all 3 color cartridges will be exhausted, and that's a $300 bill to replace them all. These kinds of color laserjets are good for businesses where they are printing graphs and reports that make use of color. The image quality isn't really good enough for photo or high quality picture and the cost per page for printing pictures is pretty high. By contrast the HP 1200 inkjet is a 1200 dpi printer. Ink cartridges are rated at 1750 pages at 5% and cost $34 per cartridge, which puts them comparable to the HP color laserjet cartridges in price. The printer itself is less than half the cost of the 2550L. Ted
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