office multi-function printer recommendations

[Tom Buskey]

On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 2:45 PM, Benjamin Scott <dragonhawk at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 1:55 PM, Greg Rundlett (freephile)
> <greg at freephile.com> wrote:
> > I'm searching for a color printer/scanner/copier/fax ...
>
>  They all suck.
>
>
They suck less if you have one OS to support (and it's not MacOSX or a Unix
variant).

I've had better luck with Adobe postscript printers.    Unix and Macintosh
assume postscript and generic drivers work.  Anything else is iffy unless
ghostscript does a good job converting.

The Samsung color laser I have at home isn't postscript and has issues.
Ghostscript does a better job on a Brother with brscript, a postscript
clone.  I had an HP Laserjet 8100DN that claimed Adobe Postscript and failed
to print PDFs.  HP actually shipped a clone in that model.

I've had decent luck with Textronix Phasers in the past- and they're now
Xerox.

I print to a 5655 at work and it works well from Windows, Solaris, Linux as
a postscript printer.

At work we have some Xerox WorkCenter printers.  We have a VM running
Windows as the print server for everything.  No direct printing.

We have a higher end system (Firey?) that doesn't work for end users.  The
print room doesn't like it either, but they can babysit it better.

Scanning goes to a PDF on a file server and that works well.

We don't use the FAX.

Accounting?  If you're trying to do charge back, you'll probably spend more
on that then you get back.

If you're trying to charge students, they have more time & creativity then
money and will be able to out think you :-)

Have a print server do the accounting with all the printers on a private
network that isn't accessable to users.  Then you don't care about the
printer doing accounting.  Or even if it can.

It's hard to get a networked printer to deny connections:
   cat file.ps | nc -v printer 9100
goes around the print server to the jetdirect port for example.
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