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 = [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Senior Systems Programmer or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute or [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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