[argyllcms] Printer advice

Hi,

I am still steadily building a fully color managed work environment. I have 
calibrated and profiled my monitors, and profiled my scanner.

I have now come to the printer. Again I have several questions. Maybe some are 
not for this list, but some of you may have useful pointers for me to pursue 
elsewhere.

I'll repeat here that my work environment is linux (I work with several 
flavours on different computers: Mandriva 2008.0, Fedora 8, Centos 5.x).

I currently have an Epson Stylus Photo 950. This printer has served me well, 
but starts to show signs of aging. Notably, I can't print full bleed anymore 
on non-photo paper, this causes ugly black ink marks on the bottom of the 
page. Sometimes I even have these at the top. As far as I can tell this is 
due to wear of the mechanics.

So I am looking for a new printer. As we tend to print quite a bit, I'd prefer 
it to be a very robust printer. It should also be capable of printing 
ordinary documents as well as very good quality photo's. Fast or slow is less 
relevant, fast is of course more pleasant. Finally, it should be a networked 
printer. This is important, as I have several computers that need to print to 
it, and none of them is immediatly next to the printer.

If the printer is not networked in itself, I can use a simple print server to 
attach the printer to. I have the ESP950 configured like that as well. But 
here I encounter my first problem. With this setup, I haven't figured out yet 
how to check ink levels and do other printer maintenance stuff. There is 
reportedly the escputil that does this, but it appears to work only for 
directly connected printers (it requires the raw device name for 
bidirectional tasks such as ink levels). If anybody here has managed to solve 
this, I would be very, very interested. It's currently my most annoying 
issue.

If there is no solution for this, I will probably opt for a HP printer. A lot 
of them are supported through hplip which comes with a good toolbox to manage 
the printer (including ink levels). Other printer brands are as far as I know 
way less supported by linux. So unless someone has got experiences that 
counter this idea, I'll avoid those.

So here my questions:
* Has anyone on this list managed to read inklevels from an epson printer 
attached to a simple print server from linux over the network ?
* What printers could you recommend for my environment ?

So far, I have retained two printers:
* HP OfficeJet Pro K5400: good allround office printer, but slightly less 
photo quality (according to the reviews I found). Other pro's: can have two 
paper trays (useful in my environment), comes with built-in network card.
* HP Photosmart Pro 8850: pro level photoprinter, with 8 inkcartridges. No 
doubt this will give me better photo quality, but it will probably cost me 
quite a bit on ink as well. Additionally it is A3+ (not required) and only 
has got one paper tray.

Any experiences on these models are welcome as well.

Thank you,

Geert
-- 
Kobalt W.I.T.
Web & Information Technology
Brusselsesteenweg 152
1850 Grimbergen

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