[ale] looking for a reasonably priced color laser printer

[Michael B. Trausch]

On Sat, 2011-01-22 at 22:12 -0500, Geoffrey Myers wrote:
> Thanks muchly for all the input.  I ended up picking up a Lexmark 
> C543dn.  The linuxprinting.org website says the C543 works perfect, so
> I thought I'd take a chance on the C543dn (d = duplex printing) (n =
> network)

That is one thing I truly like about Lexmark's laser printers:  The
numbers are typically opaque, but the stuff around the numbers are not.
The prefix and suffix to the bare model number makes it quite clear what
the high-level capabilities of the printer are.  It's quite nice.

> So far I'm very pleased with it.  Quiet, fast.  Duplex printing works 
> for Linux and Mac.  Got it on my network.  Got the rpm driver from 
> linuxprinting.org.  Lexmark has an rpm driver, but it's 3 years older,
> so I'm sticking with the one I've got.

You will likely find that duplex printing works just as well with the
generic PostScript driver that comes with CUPS.  I've found that to be
sufficient for the printing end, since configuration can easily be
handled through the printer's Web UI.

> Printing from Centos, Mac OSX.  Can't get the drivers installed for my
> wife's XP school laptop, because they have them locked down.  They
> give you instructions for installing a printer, but you have to have
> an *.inf and all the lexmark drivers are in an exe archive, which
> never completely unpacks the driver before trying to install, at which
> time, you get the message, you need to be admin.

If the laptop has the ability to print to PDF, you can still print to
the printer (though not very straightforwardly) purely in userland:

 * Generate a PDF
 * Convert it to PostScript using a portable, probably staticly linked
   GhostScript binary
 * FTP the resulting PostScript file to the printer's built-in FTP
   server, and the printer will queue it up and print it.

Of course that only works if the resulting PostScript document fits in
the printer's RAM.  :)

	--- Mike
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