[kwlug-disc] Recommended printer / scanner all in one combo.

[Chris Irwin]

On Sun, 2010-01-17 at 00:05 -0500, unsolicited wrote:
> Nobody doing colour laser instead of inkjet?

I have a Brother HL4040CDN colour laser. It is network-attached and
worked out of the box with Ubuntu. It shares through all the regular
Unixy methods you would expect and advertises via avahi. Adding a
printer in system-config-printer automatically sees it on the network,
you just need to select it and go.

It is a simple PCL printer and actually gets detected as a 4040CN (the
identical model minus duplex), but duplex works so I never bothered
correcting the ID. Interestingly, the reference page indicates that you
need to modify the 4040CN definition to have duplex work. Maybe Ubuntu
handled this. Again, I don't really care why it works :)

http://www.openprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=Brother-HL-4040CDN
http://www.openprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=Brother-HL-4040CN

I ended up adding more memory to the unit as I got out of memory errors
when printing pages with graphics. I guess it uses a lot of memory
translating PCL encoded graphics. Seems to work passably well now.

Apparently there is some sort of FTP and POP3 mode so I can email or FTP
a document to it and have it print it out automatically. Never bothered
looking into it. I don't quite see the target for that functionality.

Apparently Brother has some proprietary drivers on their website. They
actually package them as .deb and .rpm files, so it should be easy to
handle if you wanted to go that route. I have never even compared them
as they are 32-bit and I didn't feel the need to go through the manual
process for a 64-bit system just to satisfy my curiosity.

http://solutions.brother.com/linux/sol/printer/linux/cups_drivers.html

If I was to buy again, I'd pay a little extra and go for the 4050 series
as it does Postscript natively. Then I apparently wouldn't need special
drivers on Windows or Mac OS either.


-- 
Chris Irwin
e:  chris at chrisirwin.ca
w: http://chrisirwin.ca

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