[muglo] Re: printer for G4.
- From: "Eric D." <hideme666@xxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: <muglo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 02 Mar 2003 23:33:07 -0500
on 2/3/03 11:04 PM, Alex at admeddemda@xxxxxx wrote:
> I've noticed lemark printers currently for sale are all Mac 9x and X
> compatible, whereas, for example, HP printers are hit and miss...
> some are , some arent.
If you're willing to suffer through being forced to buy Lexmark cartridges &
pretty poor print quality then the Lexmark is Ok for you (everyone I've ever
known to own a Lexmark has sworn at them, not by them).
As with everything, caveat emptor. When I recently priced out TCO for
printers (our lab was getting one, and we also bought one), Lexmark came out
by far the worst -- their printers were cheap but their cartridges were
_extremely_ expensive (inkjets; the reviews I saw of their lasers totally
turned me off... plus, we needed a networkable laser) compared to the
competition.
We ended up with a Canon i550. It was quite a bit more expensive than a
comparable Lexmark or HP but TCO was *much* *much* less (my
back-of-the-envelop calculations showed that even if we went through only
one colour & one B&W cartridge/year (unrealistic for two people in
education) the Lexmark would cost more)
Even though HP may be "hit and miss" I'd prefer them since they've got a
*very* successful track record making good laser printers (HP LaserJet 4
anyone... perhaps the greatest workhorse ever made!!!). I thought Apple (the
problems were actually Apple with a lot of postscript printers) fixed most
of the driver problems in OS X 10.2.3/10.2.4... I now have *near* parity
with the Windows features for the HP 1200n. The one thing they have which I
would love is *seamless* double sided printing where you click one button
and it prints even pages, reversed and odd pages, forward (manual feed)
automatically. In OS X (& 9) (for postscript printers) you have to print
even pages reverse and then print odd pages fwd *again* but this time
remember to select manual feed... the coding is so simple to implement
<grumble>... Canon does it for a silly little inkjet, why can't Apple do it
for PostScript lasers... the reason I pin this on Apple is that Apple does
all the printer driver coding, third parties simply provide printer
description files (ergo PDFs)). Of course, if I had a Brother 1870n all the
time at my beck-and-call that'd be easy as pie since it has built-in
double-sided printing (but, I predict that one or two years of heavy use
will cause this feature to fail... it's already looking a little flakey
after only 6 months of use).
Think about the number of trees such a feature would save (of course, we
live in Canada which is just north of the great lunacy of the Bushes, and in
the country home to King Ralph "the moron" Kline and his court full of oil
executives functioning as jesters ;P
L8r, Eric.
L8r, Eric.
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