The Unforgiving Minute

For the last 15 years I’ve gone through a succession of cheap inkjet printers, mostly HP with one or two Canons thrown in. They were at best “alright”, with the early ones being slow and heavy but solid and well-made. With commoditization and relentless competition, printer makers raced each other downward both in price and quality. My last two printers were “free”, bundled with PC purchases, and worth every penny I paid for them.

The hardware was all flimsy plastic, ink cartridges seemed to get both shorter-lived and harder to refill, drivers grew ridiculously bloated and flaky, and reliability just flat-out sucked. None of them had network support, either, so I ended up either sneakernetting files to the machine attached to the printer or futzing around with host-based printer sharing setups.

All along I’ve wanted to do it the right way and get a “real” printer, a networked laser with PostScript support. Back in the day I bought inkjets because good lasers cost as much as (or more than!) a computer, and since my printing needs are pretty light I could limp along well enough with the little light-duty ink-squirters. Still, I always had it in the back of my mind to finally get a decent printer.

Then I saw an ad from Newegg for a little Samsung ML-2851ND network laser printer, on sale for $119 with free shipping (it’s currently $149). Hell, I paid 3x that for my first HP DeskJet back in the day!

A little research turned up good reviews and, more important for me, excellent support for non-Windows platforms. Some low-end lasers use oddball proprietary print languages (like Samsung’s own SPL), which make you jump through conversion/filtering hoops if you’re using a *nix operating system. The ML-2851 does PostScript and supports the classic Unix LPD/LPR printing, so it “just works” with basically no fuss.

I ordered one up, got it three days later and plugged it into the switch. It pulled an IP address off the router and went right to work. OS X automagically found and configured the printer (I’m using the generic PostScript driver, haven’t even looked at the driver CD that came with the printer). The OpenBSD boxes only needed a very simple /etc/printcap file along the lines of:

lp|Samsung ML-2851ND PostScript network printer:
    :lp=:
    :sh:
    :rm=<IP address>:
    :lf=/var/log/lpd-errs:

My first test print from OpenBSD showed the classic UNIX “stair-step” printing phenomenon, like so:

line 1
      wraps to line 2
                     like this

This comes from a difference between DOS/Windows machines, which use both a carriage return character and a line feed character to indicate a new line (CR+LF), and *real* computers, which only use a line feed (LF). The Unix box was sending LFs to move down a line, but not CRs to move back to the left margin, hence the stair-step effect. Fortunately, Samsung includes an option in the printer settings to switch between the two newline styles.

So far I’m pretty impressed with this little printer. Administration is done via a simple and very thorough Web-based control panel; it supports almost every printing protocol on the planet (still use EtherTalk? you’re in luck!), you have fine-grained control over individual printing protocols and security settings… Basically, everything I’d want is in there. The only thing missing is a way of changing settings directly on the printer itself; there’s no display or control buttons on the printer aside from the usual idiot lights and the “I put more paper in, please start printing again” button.

Print quality is very nice, speed’s great, duplexing is supported, and it idles at 8 watts yet warms up in just a few seconds. I haven’t owned it long enough to comment on long-term durability, but so far I think it offers a helluva lot more value for the dollar than my “free” inkjets ever did.