Which Printer/scanners work with Mint?

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geekomatic
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Which Printer/scanners work with Mint?

Post by geekomatic »

Linux "used to" be printed on the printer box. No more.

I'm after a printer/scanner with front display. Any brand, as long as it'll work with Mint.

Cheers
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The Muffin Man
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Re: Which Printer/scanners work with Mint?

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Lady Fitzgerald
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Re: Which Printer/scanners work with Mint?

Post by Lady Fitzgerald »

I recently bought a Brother HL-L8360CDW (color laser). Although I've only done test prints with it so far, it does seem to work quite well. It has the ability to do automatic two sided printing. While you can download a driver for it, it will work just fine out of the box.

I recommend staying away from inkjet printers unless you use them daily or need to print photos on photo paper. Unless used frequently, preferably daily, the heads in inkjet printers will get clogged and you have to use a large amount of expensive ink to unclog them.

Laser printers cost more upfront but cost considerably less to use per printed page than inkjets and are not prone to clogging.

Unless space is extremely limited or your budget is really tight, I also suggest staying away from the so called all-in-ones or three-in-ones. Overall quality tends to be lower than separate components. Usually, if one function fails, the other one will also cease to work.

Four printer brands I do not recommend are HP, Samsung, Epson, and Lexmark. HP makes good printers but they DRM their toner cartridges with expiration dates. Once the cartridge expires, you no longer can change your settings. If a printer is discontinued, existing cartridges still on store shelves will eventually expire. I had to toss an otherwise perfectly fine HP due to nonexpired cartridges no longer being available. Also, HP has less than stellar tech help (the other reason I will not buy HP products anymore).

Samsung makes garbage appliances, such as refrigerators, washers and dryers, etc. that do not last long. The same is true of their printers and their tech help is even worse than HP's.

I've owned only two Epson products—an inkjet printer and a flatbed scanner—and both were problematic from the word go. I didn't have them for very long before replacing them. They did make a satisfying thump in the bottom of the dumpster when I tossed them inside.

Lexmark quality varies from product to product. The company I now get my retirement plan from switched from HP to Lexmark the standalone printers were OK but the all-in-ones were unreliable. My biggest complaint against the printer was their cartridges were far more expensive than the equivalent HPs.

The printer I recently bought is my first Brother. Brother is highly recommended by the Linux community so I'm optimistic about this one.

I recommend Cannon for flatbed scanners. I have a 9000F that is well over a decade old and still works just fine for my "daily driver". They are still available as new or renewed but they aren't cheap. I recently bought a Canon CanoScan Lide 400 Slim Scanner to use for a portable scanner I can keep in my laptop bag for when I'm on the road. It gets good reviews for use at home.

I also have a Fujitsu ix500 duplexing ADF scanner I'm very happy with. In English, duplexing means it can scan both sides of a document in a single pass. ADF means Automatic Document Feed; you can place a stack of documents in it and it will automatically feed them trough the cameras. It replaced my older Fujitsu S1500, which worked fine but I wanted an upgrade. Both are still available for a reasonable price as renewed units. I don't know which model replaced the ix500 but any one of Fujitsu's scanners will probably be good.

Cannon and Fujitsu doesn't have drivers for Linux but you can buy a universal driver called VueScan from hamrick.com. for $25, $50, or $100, depending on your needs. You can also try it out for free. You need only one driver for all your scanners and the license can be used on up to four computers at a time. It's a lifetime license that can be updated as often as you want.
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Re: Which Printer/scanners work with Mint?

Post by pinnerite »

I currently have a Brother DCP-L3510CDW Colour laser printer/scanner. It is wiFi driven.
It runs beautifully under Linux Mint 20.3 and 21.1 as well as Windows 10.
Under Windows XP I had to use Microsoft's default colour printer driver.

I have also found Samsung's colour laser printers excellent but when i bought mine they didn't have scanners.
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