[geeks] personal laser printer

der Mouse mouse at Rodents.Montreal.QC.CA
Thu Dec 15 16:18:41 CST 2005


> I am looking for a decent personal laser printer.

Well, my laser printer is an HP IIISi with an Ethernet card.  I've been
happy with it so far, and see no reason to expect that to change.

As for working with Unix, well, it has an Ethernet, so it's on the
house LAN, and hosts just need to connect to port 9100 and throw
PostScript at it.  Doesn't matter what OS the host is running.

Of course, whether that counts as "personal" is debatable.  It's
certainly way overkill in many respects; this is the sort of printer
that gets used in environments where it's turned on 50+ hours a week
and its paper consumption is measured in reams rather than pages.  But
it's a really solid beast that basically Just Works.  To a first (and
maybe even second) approximation I'm its only user, though, so arguably
it _is_ "personal".

The only things even vaguely annoying about it:

(1) Its font repertoire is relatively limited - Times, Helvetica, Zapf
Dingbats, Zapf Chancery Medium Italic, Courier, with some variations in
weight and slant...and a bunch of other fonts which to a typographer
are doubtless very different but to the unskilled eye are almost
indistinguishable, like Bookman and New Century Schoolbook.  And that's
about it.  Anything else has to come from the host as part of the print
job.

(2) There is no access control on the Ethernet, so I had to put it on
the non-routed portion of the hosue LAN.

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