Printing on the Cheap

We used to pay quite a bit of money fairly regularly for our color inkjet printer. It was an HP OfficeJet 6300. The cartridges cost IIRC about $50 for both the color and the black and white. With the HP 95 and HP 98 cartridges. You got about 420 b/w pages, 320 color out of it. Also, when you printed black and white, it would discharge some of the color ink, lowering its supply. Furthermore, the system balked whenever refilled ink was loaded. I think there may have been a lawsuit about that. At best, (420 + 320 pages) works out to 7 cents per page. At worst (420) works out to 12.5 cents per page. Well we were all the time running out of ink and often couldn't get new cartridges and so were unable to print.

I figured that, although HP makes good (linux compatible) printers (TY!), there had to be a better option, pricewise. I researched it some and came up with the Brother DCP-L2540DW black and white laser printer. I am sure other inexpensive Brother B/W lasers would have similar results.

You can get these for $80 - $130 either normally or sometimes on sale if you check http://bensbargains.net, http://slickdeals.net or http://techbargains.net. It wasn't strictly a necessity to have color, surely it was better to be able to print in an emergency than not to be able to print at all. Plus if I wanted to print color, I could always run down to a FedEx or something. Or even get a color laser later on.

Let's look at the economics. This thing with the TN-660 catridge gets 2600 I think pages per toner cartridge. You can buy the Linkyo compatible catridge for anywhere between $10 and $13. So cost per page is an astonishing 0.38 - 0.5 cents. I've also heard it's very reliable.

The only catch was, while it prints/scans from Windows fine, I couldn't figure out how to get it to print from Linux. I could only scan. Well finally got it to print today thanks to some advice on the net (I forget the URL, but kudos to them!). Here is how:

		(NOTE: I am assuming here you've set it up with a network IP like I
		did, you can do that from the menu system)

		(to install brother printer for us
		(go here: http://support.brother.com/g/b/agreement.aspx?dlid=dlf006893_000&c=us_ot&lang=en)
		(it should offer to download linux-brprinter-installer-2.0.0-1.gz)
		(download and run "gunzip linux-brprinter-installer-2.0.0-1.gz")
		(then "sudo bash ./linux-brprinter-installer-2.0.0-1")
		(when it asks for model number, say "DCP-L2540DW")
		(agree to all licenses)
		(when it says: Will you specify the Device URI? [Y/n] ->)
		(say "Y")
		(enter your IP (mine was: "192.168.1.209"))
		(print test page)
		(follow prompts to configure scanner as well)
		(should work)
		)
	      

Such a relief! Glad their tool worked.