[lug] Inexpensive Laser Printer (a quick review)

[J. Wayde Allen]

On Mon, 1 Oct 2001, Ferdinand Schmid wrote:

> I hope you don't see this as off topic...

Not sure why something like this would be considered off topic?  Printing
is certainly something that a Linux user is likely to want to do.

> - but have any of you looked at cups ( http://www.cups.org/ )?

No, didn't know about it until now.

> It is unfortunately semi-commercial

Looks like it is sold under the GPL, and I don't think that paying for
Linux software is necessarily a bad thing.

> but they have tried to address a lot of these issues.  And I have been
> using it for a while now with decent success.  CUPS is certainly not
> perfect yet but it can eliminate many printing issues.

OK, but I guess I was trying to understand these so-called "issues".  Is
the real issue that one doesn't just plug a printer in and it simply runs?  
I can see that, but I also tend to be a bit wary of so-called
plug-and-play systems.  While I can see where this can be convenient, I
worry about losing the ability to adapt to new and unusual hardware.  For
instance, I like to make carbon pigment prints
<http://rmp.opusis.com/carbon/gallery.html> and these require large
amounts of UV light to expose.  I've thought about building a kind of
printer that exposes the material directly using an UV laser.  With the
current *nix system I could build the new hardware, code up or simply use
an existing printer parallel port module, and write a filter to print JPEG
images on this device.  With a plug-and-play system I worry that it would
take more effort to either get the system to recognize such unusual
hardware, or to shut it down and build up a new print system.

I like the *nix building block approach.  It seems that we can deal with
some of the usability issues without giving up this degree of modularity,
but sometimes I wonder if it isn't the modularity that people don't like?

- Wayde
  (wallen at lug.boulder.co.us)