I thought I would just ask here.
Is there something to printers that are monochrome working better with Linux vs colored printers? It seems like all of the recommendations I come across online are monochrome printers OR they are very expensive office-style printers.
Hm. I don’t think I have enough experience to answer that question correctly. But I doubt it.
My thought is that color takes more work, and the expensive printer companies pay for the staff to perform the extra work. It’s not so much 3 numbers vs 1 per pixel, but people are far more sensitive to color variation than “black” variation, and I’ll bet that color printers have an API dedicated to color balance.
Likely down to a supply and demand thing. Color printers aren’t programmed to run and function on Linux because there is no “need” for that to be the case. Linux is used by a lot of people but when you look at the entire market, most people still use Windows, following by Apple. If we include phones, Android appears to be leading and Linux is even more of an after thought.
Also, I don’t know anyone who uses a printer these days unless they work from home or have some sort of small at-home business and need to print shipping labels.
I was going to dig into this a bit and see what the case is for this but the site we are on now already has information on finding a comparable printer!
I am not sure if there is anything to the monochrome thing or not. I personally don’t use a printer and haven’t owned one since like 2005 (which was a basic plug and print one).
I will look this over. Thanks!
And yeah it may just be down to programming. It seems many printers are designed to function with specific operating systems and use specific cartridges. I have heard of some companies putting a lock on their printers if you use off-name ink cartridges.
You can get some from Brother and any which have a universal printing driver. You should also look at opensource drivers and printers that support the IPS protocol in full.
Often, printers might need a setup manually by installing those drivers yourself, so I’d say to take a couple look at inkjets and see if they have any drivers available foe debian/fedora. Or if you are on Arch, take a look through the AUR.
Often color printers will be more expensive to get and upkeep as you require more ink in the CYMK colour spectrum. They will also print slower compared to monochrome laser printers so please keep that in mind.
If I also understand correctly, some will put locks onto the printers which you can get around sometimes by pressing CANCEL (Usually a triangle with a triangle padded inside) and OK at the same time which is the case for some Hitachi Printers.
This is just my thought on the perceived dearth of colour printers for Linux.
PostScript drivers are mostly used with Monochrome printers, that makes them to find compatibility with Linux through open-source because they are generic. On the other hand, colour printers always tend to use drivers that are only available through the manufacturer. It might always tend to have compatibility issues with Linux.