Recommendation for a reliable Color Printer (with MFP features?) supporting Linux

[Amos Shapira]

On 28 February 2010 09:58, shimi <linux-il at shimi.net> wrote:
> Actually the separate 6 color cartridges is probably a waste of money.
> Again, from my experience, most colors end at around the same time (unless
> it's a company printer and your company logo doesn't use the 3 base colors
> at the same level ;); And you probably pay more for all this additional
> packaging, and there's a good chance that it might outweight the savings of
> having the ability to replace one cartridge 5 pages before the other...

See below. I found the numbers from the printer's admin interface and
they are somewhere in the middle. IMHO they justify the separate
cartridges.

>
> What I do have to wonder here is again the plumbing. I have a similar
> printer at work (at least by the looks of it - the 7500 series) - and it
> seems that now the ink cartridges are separate from the print heads (like it
> was always with Canon, Epson and others, but not HP). So that puts the
> advantage I previously discussed regarding HP (where you replaced the
> printing head every time, so it never got plumbing problems) behind a big
> question mark. How much time do you have the printer? How many times did you
> replace the ink since then? What happens if you don't print for a few weeks?
> Does it get dry? Do you have to "clean" the heads every once in a while
> because you see opacity on your printouts? I'm kinda used by now to
> print-every-time-at-the-same-quality of the Laser world :-)

I think we have that printer for about 18 months now.
Here is the usage report straight from the printer's web interface:

Cartridge  	Number used
Black 	4
Yellow 	3
Light Cyan 	1
Cyan 	2
Light Magenta 	2
Magenta 	3

That's over a total page count of 1678, 6 of them on photo paper and
the rest on plain. All 1672 plain papers were A4 size. BTW my wife
sometimes re-use the other side of printed paper and I don't recall
this has caused problems.
The expiration period on most cartridges seem to be 2 years. The
current Light Cyan cartridge was installed 26-8-2008 and will expire
on 24-9-2010. I guess since it's the first Light Cyan cartridge that
this is about the time we bought the printer (i.e end of August 2008).
The Cyan cartridge is close to empty, but even if we had to change it
today we still used it for 3-4 months longer than the Magenta or
Yellow, which were replaced around last November.
No problems about extended non-use periods (e.g. when we visited
Israel for 5 weeks).
Not aware that we had to clean the heads any time.

Hope this helps,

--Amos

PS - Browsing around the printer's interface I noticed a neat
"webscan" feature, which allows you to scan a document and download it
completely through the printer's web interface, without having to
install any software on the computer.