Unreliable printer manufacturers

[freshminted]

Having sold off my excellent Canon laser printer for lack of Kubuntu software, I replaced it with Lexmark. The C543dn has duplexing and separate colour toners for its laser system, and allegedly a high resolution print finish.
The print quality is not as good as I would expect, but worse: toners run out in no time at all, never quite meeting the criteria the manufacturer has set. But worse still is the failure of the image processing unit after just 1600 print copies. Well within guarantee the Technical Support team were slow to respond, failed to note information sent to them, and all in all did everything possible to ensure that their company looked as if it doesn't give a damn about customers. This was confirmed by the total lack of response from their VP Consumer products to a personal email.
My advice to Linux users is that they should at all costs avoid Lexmark. Fortunately HP have far superior equipment albeit quite a lot dearer. One has of course to remember that the ONLY thing that matters to Lexmark is the bottom line - customer complaints and meeting warranty obligations are very low in the company's agenda. Ask the people in Scotland!

[alexan]

There's an excellent project around there (http://linuxhcl.com/)

Hardware manufacturer are the big and real problem for Linux community of users... not Microsoft
Windows user by principle shouldn't buy Win-only hardware: what if someday they would try a libre OS (or keep using Windows XP)?
No choice, no freedom



Apple user are masochists by default: their stuff doesn't matter. But Personal Computer should stay Personal Computer... not Microsoft's one

[reiki]

I bought a Brother HL4150CDN when my Samsung 300N went belly up. I'm pretty happy with Brother's linux support. They have a section on their web site devoted to linux drivers, the install instructions actually work, AND I can see toner levels and everything.

And for whatever reason, I no longer have problems printing PDF files which would lock up the Samsung. ..... weird .....

[Fedz]

Epson inkjet printers: I've got 2 of em & they work like a dream - way better than Windows by a long long chalk :) whoop!

HP to my understanding is known to be play well with Linux & has done for donkeys years :)

[jmore9]

I still use my hp deskjet 952 and it works just fine. Never had any problems with it except it does use up a lot of the color carts, when doing color photos. But i would give it a 10 out of 10.

[Oxwivi]

HP printers are great, so is support on Linux, HP FTW!

[freshminted]

Thank you all for your comments. My objection to Lexmark is not that it has no Linux support or Linux software, albeit minimal, it is that the company has a real attitude problem. We are not customers to be wooed and valued, we are merely a means to an end - making the company rich. The proof? Look what they did in Scotland! Incidentally other than not being able to carry out the maintenance and visual checks on my Epson, it has served me well and the company were quite supportive.

[Lucradia]

Remarkably, I found my All-in-one HP M1522nf at a savers in town. It was priced at 19.98 USD. Fortunately, my grandmother was with me, AND it was a Wednesday, so we got 30% off of it. I then gave my grandma my old Officejet 6500, as it was more efficient to have that with her than the old lexmark she had.

Truly, a great buy. But, I don't share the same views about Lexmark. I just have an annoyance that they won't re-release their Linux SDK for Drivers. They used to have it all over their website, now every single link for it results in 404, or the links have been removed completely.

I say stick with HP.

[satanselbow]

Printer manufacturers are not only a problem for Linux users - every Windows release sees a raft of AIO units and scanners fall by the wayside.

Why do you think they (printers/AIO) are so cheap? Manufacturers model them with a particular windows OS in mind and rapidly dump them when the next one comes along. There are some printers that work fine on a vanilla XP but have no support/software on a fully patched XP SP3.

When it comes to printing/scanning we all get shafted regardless of OS - although Win users admittedly have less of a hard time.

Maybe is some sort of self destructing save the trees eco conspiracy on the part of the printer manufacturers themselves? If no-one can reliably print anything Lexmark save the planet - hurrah!

[Johnsie]

Epson and HP are good... Canon and Lexmark are not so good. Most large companies here would use HP or Xerox printers.

[BrokenKingpin]

Printers by nature are unreliable in my opinion... no matter what brand things just go wrong with them. For that reason I find it a bit hard to recommend a brand to some one. That being said, some printers just don't work on Linux at all, such as a lot of Lexmark models (so avoid them IMO).

On Linux I really like my Canon MP250 because you can get the drivers and scanner software directly from their website for Ubuntu (.Deb packages), which I thought was awesome.

[clanky]

HP printers are great, so is support on Linux, HP FTW!

I have an HP photosmart which said quite clearly on the box "Windows 7 ready - some advanced features may not work". Who would have guessed that printing was an advanced feature?

Have tried everything, newest drivers / older drivers / full featured drivers / basic drivers - nothing.

Works like a dream in Fedora!

[nrundy]

My Brother printer works great on Ubuntu.

[Warpnow]

Are you printing too much too fast?

Printers are rated at duty cycle, too.

If you buy one rated to print 500 pages per month then print 2000 it will die fast no matter what brand it is.

There's a reason high volume companies spend thousands on printers.

[freshminted]

Having instigated complaints about Lexmark and Epson printers, I have to take it all back. Eat Humble Pie.
Why?
Because with Ubuntu 11.04 and 11.10 they didn't simply self install, but all the additional advantages such as CD printing, were installed. The printing quality jumped into near perfect, and so I admit - perhaps I was a little hasty in my criticism.
Now if only Canon worked the same way ........

[Linux_junkie]

All this talk about Lexmark printers reminds me of the time in 2002/2003 when I started getting interested in using Linux and getting Mandrake 9.1 installed.

I had a Lexmark printer at the time which was set up under Windows 98 and worked pretty well. However when I installed Mandrake alongside Windows I tried to install the Lexmark printer driver (for Linux) under Mandrake and try as I might could not get the printer to work.

I even went to the official Lexmark website to download the official printer driver for Linux for the model I had and installed it but still the printer would not print anything.

I went out and bought an HP printer and it worked "out of the box". Had HP printers ever since.

[CharlesA]

Back to sleep you go..