On Wed, 2006-03-15 at 14:18 -0700, Nathan wrote:

> Cool!  My wife's been wanting a photo-printer, and our scanner is on
> it's last legs and can only be used at the computer it`s plugged into.
>  I'd like to add a headless linux server to my home setup soon, so the
> compatibility would be very useful there.

In a fit of nerdness today, on my lunch break I got my office linux
workstation and my powerbook laptop all scanning remotely.  Scanner is
at home a couple of miles away while my machines here access it over an
openvpn tunnel.  Worked very well (even 300 dpi scans were reasonable
speeds).  Over the LAN you can't tell it's not a local scanner.

> 
> Tell me, how are the ink prices for that thing?  Have you tried
> printing photos on photo-paper yet?  Are you sharing the printer as
> well?  Details, I need details!  I may just go out and get one of
> those as a present for our upcoming wedding anniversary...

Ahh, yeah, well ink prices are always horrible.  Colors are about 10
dollars a piece (this is a four-color printer) and each cartridge lasts
somewhere around maybe several hundred pages.  Photo printing would be
way worse.  There are third-pary ink cartridges available, but your
mileage will vary.  I found that the old cartridges from my Epson C82
photo printer work in this printer, accept that they altered some little
tabs so as to lock out the older cartridges (it's an "upgrade!").  I
just cut off the tab and the old cartridges still worked wonderfully.

The CX3810's copy functionality is pretty basic but works (full color
copies are slower).  

I haven't yet printed photos but I have printed photos with an epson
photo printer before (same print head and same inks) and the results
were *very* good, but the highest quality output was very very slow
(maybe 20 minutes to print a 8x11 print at full color, full quality).
This printer may be somewhat faster, but I doubt it.  

The printer can be shared easily through cups and samba. Just put the
native driver on the windows machines (and cups will print in raw mode)
and you should have all the nice paper and quality options.  For
printing from linux, it looks like for best results you need the latest
version of gimp-print installed, which is now called gutenprint (version
5.0).  I have installed that over top of gimp-print (should coexist).
Gutenprint will provide a foomatic-based ppd for cups so once you
install gutenprint and restart cups you should be able to use the cups
web interface to select the print filter for it.  All unix computers
will then print through this filter via cups.

Michael



> 
> ~ Nathan
> 
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