Regular readers will be aware that my standard answers to the "which printer/multi-function device should I buy?" are "Hewlett Packard", "HP" and "Hewlett Packard", mainly because of their linux support.
I am further impressed now that I have upgraded from the old hpoj/hpijs drivers to the newer hplip drivers for my multi-function HP PSC 2210 printer/scanner/card reader/fax machine. hpoj required some pretty horrible command line stuff to get the printer going, very unintuitive command structure and a case of following a set of disconnected web pages. Sure it worked, but needed improvement. The new beast was easier to set up and now includes an (optional) gui. Screenshot available here: http://rout.co.nz/hp-device-mgr.png As you can see it has various panels, the first one has buttons to trigger printing (brings up a gui where you can add files then print them), scan (fires up xsane), Access photo cards (its own gui giving thumbnails and the ability to copy some or all to another directory etc). However Send fax is not yet implemented (nor was it from windows when I bought the device). The programs that are actually fired up can be configured withing the gui - ie you could bring up kooka instead of xsane for scanning. There is access to the print logs, various maintanance functions, and it tells you how much ink you have left. The functionality is also available on the command line, for example hp-levels returns a nice little summary of the inkl levels. hp-photo is an ftp like client to access the photo card reader (actually not limited to photos of course, its just a regular flash card reader). All very nicely done, plus of course there are supplied PPD files so the printer can work just fine with all the normal linux printing mechanisms like cups. Whats more the icon to start the gui installed itself nicely in the gnome menu :-) I also discovered in the process how to get windows to print directly to cups, without samba being involved, so that was a nice bonus. And no, HP are not paying me to write this!
