This is in response to Rodney's post about how great Epson supposedly is. I have a (newish) Epson Stylus CX3500 multifunction. It was given to me by my Dad, because he hated it. It took a significant amount of work to get it going, it can use the GimpPrint driver for the CX3200, but it prefers a driver from Epson. Getting the scanner working was even harder. Admittedly, I was surprised that Epson even provided drivers. From a hardware point of view, the printer is quite shit. It thinks it has run out of magenta and yellow ink (it hasn't), so as a result it refuses to print anything (even in black) or scan anything (which obviously requires printer ink). It is quite possibly the worst printer I have ever owned (perhaps second only to those made by Lexmark).

Compare and contrast this to the Hewlett-Packard printers I've used. Every single one of these has just worked (once I'd installed the appropriate CUPS driver). Some require the hpijs (for Deskjets) or hpoj (for Officejets) drivers. We have PSC's working at work under Fedora Core 4 (I can't remember which driver they require offhand, I suspect it is hpoj). Jetdirect enabled printers are an absolute dream to work with and administer. As for price, the UCC bought a HP 1320N network enabled Laserjet with duplexing module for under $1000, their base-line colour laser is also under $1000 last time I checked.

This is not to say that Rodney's Epson does not work quite nicely. My old Pentium 3 works quite nicely too, straight out of the box on every Linux distribution I've booted. It was a lot more work to get some new Athlon64s booting, even with Ubuntu Dapper. It was the same brand of motherboard though.

[Disclaimer: I also don't work for Epson, nor do I work for HP. Though I do have a purple HP T-shirt, and I like their calculators and their printers. I could conceivably work for HP one day, though it is highly unlikely. I have several printers that work correctly in multiple operating systems, none of them manufactured by Epson.]

For anyone who wanted to turn up, and missed my other gratuitous plugs. I am speaking at AUUG/SAGE-AU WA on Cairo in my talk Secrets of the Pyramids: an Introduction to Cairo. I always feel a little bit bad giving talks about projects I'm not involved in, but Cairo is really cool and more people should use it, so someone has to spread the word to the masses.

The talk is at the Moon and Sixpence on Murray St. and starts around 18.30. More information in the announcement. I'll put a link to the slides up after the talk.