[conspire] Bad hardware categories (wasL: July 13th CABAL meeting cancelled)

[Don Marti]

begin Rick Moen quotation of Fri, Jun 28, 2013 at 01:34:26AM -0700:

> Quoting Don Marti (dmarti at zgp.org):
> 
> > Our family has an HP LaserJet 3055, which is, as
> > far as I can tell, a solid low-end b+w laser printer
> > with a decent scanner/copier and fax device on it.
> 
> Glad to hear it.  You know, when the whole OfficeJet product line showed
> up, I was horribly disappointed by the choice of uniformly terrible 
> components, e.g., winmodem chips, really bad printer.  It's good to hear
> that someone finally remembered that the concept doesn't _need_ to be
> implemented using a collection of cheap rubbish parts.

They might be saving the LaserJet name for the good
stuff, the way that Lenovo does with the ThinkPad
brand.

> > There's an Ethernet connection for network printing,
> > and it's a real PostScript printer.
> 
> I was thinking earlier that existence of an ethernet port on a printer, 
> or even an option for one, is a very strong indication that it's a
> serious device and also not any sort of winprinter.

Another way to tell is if it shows up in a "business"
or "office" section of the web site.  Sysadmins
setting up a new printer to work with a legacy system
are a tougher audience than the home PC market.

I look up printers on OpenPrinting, which used to
be linuxprinting.org and is now part of the Linux
Foundation.  Example:

  http://www.openprinting.org/printer/HP/HP-LaserJet_3055

-- 
Don Marti                      +1-510-332-1587 (mobile)
http://zgp.org/~dmarti/        Alameda, California, USA
dmarti at zgp.org