Budget laser printer
Do budget laser printer exist which will work on trisquel? I tried finding some for Ubuntu, but it seems a real pain.
When I say budget, I don't mean that the price alone should be low (sub $100), I mean the number of pages on average it can print per carterage should be low cost, sub 2 cents.
Any recommendations. It would be amazing is a budget laser printer which costs sub $100 to buy AND sub 2 cents per print, which works out of the box too. I feel I might be asking for too much?
Maybe a used old HP printer model?
I'm not quite sure how to measure the cost per page of printing something; different pages might use different amounts of ink, and I've heard that printer manufacturers have quite a tendency to both actively inhibit your ability to use "unofficial" cartridges, and falsely report cartridges with ink in them as "empty".
In keeping with the above on HP. I use an old HP Laserjet 4050 with
Trisquel, it's mono. Very cheap refurbished, the only thing to watch
is the fuser life guarantee as they're very expensive to replace with
new ones if you can get them. I did the figures on my purchase and
worked out I could buy one and throw it away when the fuser came to
end of minimum guaranteed life (66K pages) and still pay < 0.3p +
paper price per sheet for my printing costs. As it turns out the one
I bought had 190K pages of fuser life.
Leny
True, but I was just after an average figure, i.e.
[cost of cartridge] / [number of pages on average a cartridge should be able to print] = [As long as that is less than 2 cents], I'm happy.
What do you think of this:
printer
http://www.amazon.com/HP-Laserjet-1100-LaserJet-Printer/dp/B0006MRKLY/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1415200712&sr=8-1&keywords=hp+laserjet+1100
$80 refurbished
Cost of average printed page
23 / 2500 = less than 1 cents !!!
Only question is, will it work on trisquel 7?
https://h-node.org/printers/view/en/560/HP-LaserJet-1100/1/1/undef/undef/undef/undef/undef/1100
Also, I don't have a parallel port on my computer... so I don't think I can get this printer which would have been ideal.
This is the info page on that printer:
http://hplipopensource.com/hplip-web/models/laserjet/hp_laserjet_1100.html
tl;dr: this printer should be fine if you have a parallel port. It doesn't require any proprietary firmware, and it's listed as having full support. The only downside is HP isn't providing further updates to HPLIP for this printer. Of course, you said you don't have a parallel port, so maybe you'll need to look for something else.
I bought a USB to Parallel Port adapter which was listed as working with [GNU/]Linux for <£5. If you want a guarantee such a thing will work with Trisquel then Thinkpenguin do this,
https://www.thinkpenguin.com/gnu-linux/usb-parallel-printer-cable-tpe-usbparal
But AIUI like USB to Serial cables the cheap ones tend to use Trisquel GNU/Linux compatible PLXXXX chipsets. So if it says 'works with [GNU/]Linux' there's a decent chance it will work with Trisquel.
Or how about this:
93K remaining and N so it has network. You can drive it using Postscript with CUPS+Gutenprint and never worry about expiry of HPLIP support. Beware if you tell the network side where the gateway is it'll keep trying to check for a now non-existent HP firmware upgrade. Or at least I *think* that's what mine was doing before I got the USB->Parallel connector.
Here's cheapo toner for it
Do the numbers, it's throw it away/recycle when the fuser is done. That is in approx figures assuming you only get 70K from using cheap toner: ($55+(7*$20))/70000 = $0.0028 per page. And cheaper in total over that lifetime than just the toner of your 1100. Plus even if it's only a 6000 page HP toner pack that there's 75% of it it comes with then you've more than broken even on 1100 toner cost if you make through one extra cheapo toner.