On Wed, 5 Nov 2003, Henrik Edlund wrote: > On Tue, 4 Nov 2003, Jim Trocki wrote: > > JT> from my experience those "enterprise level" printers suck, too. > > In what way?
Well, I've found the Sharp AR-651 and AR-507 have essentially broken PJL support, at least for what I would like to use it for, which is job management, accounting, and error reporting. "@PJL INFO PAGECOUNT" always reports 0, and if ustatus is enabled and the printer has been put into postscript mode via "@PJL ENTER LANGUAGE", it ignores subsequent PJL UEL sequences, so you're hosed until you reset the device. ifhp rightly bails on jobs because it can't kick the printer back into PJL mode to re-obtain sync, and close(2) on the socket will put the device's network interface into a state where subsequent connection initiations to tcp port 9100 return an RST until you power-cycle the printer. The newly-added SNMP hooks in ifhp enable you to get around some of these bugs, but I expect "enterprise level" printers to work properly in the first place, and not require meticulous experimentation to identify the bugs so you can employ work-arounds to get them to operate in a reasonable manner. I also expect "enterprise level" printers to be very robust in their error reporting and recovery capabilities. The network interfaces in these Sharp models don't support access-control lists, so you'd have to use some external packet filtering or vlan mechanism to restrict who can send jobs to the printers. There is also no automated configuration mechanism, so you have to use a silly web browser to configure each one. OTOH, these printers seem to work just fine if you blast the jobs over via the LPD protocol, completely ignoring any printing or device errors, and doing no per-job page accounting. I imagine this is what 99% of customers do. I also get the impression that most shops have their Windows clients send jobs directly to the printers via the LPD protocol, which I think is utterly ridiculous. The other "enterprise" printers which I've used are Savin/Ricoh 2055DP, 9955DP, and 9965DP. These also have dodgy PJL support, but they work acceptably if you use ifhp's PostScript pagecount and status and sync mechanisms. They do a lousy job of reporting errors via PJL and PostScript mechanisms. The thing behaves the same if it is out of paper, jammed, or not even plugged in to the electrical outlet. The internal network interface was so shoddy that the only way I could increase the reliability was to replace it with an external Jetdirect. Even though the engine is rated for 55ppm throughput (on the 2055dp model), PostScript processing and rasterization system is relatively weak, which is the limiting factor. > Of course you should always do some testing before buying. I borrowed > printers from Canon, HP and Xerox during two months when I did my testing. > Mid-range models, from 150,000 pages per month and up. > > After that, I had a pretty good basis on what printers the department > should buy next. And which models tested out favorably? What are your requirements, and what is your application? I'm evaluating an HP 9000MFP at the moment, and so far it has been working very well with the latest ifhp. 7500+ pages have been processed (about 2000 have been through ifhp, the rest photocopies), and no jobs have failed. It has jammed once or twice (maybe someone fed it cardboard), it told me about it, and it recovered gracefully afterwards. The Jetdirect network interface is actually quite good to work with, since I can configure it via TFTP on bootup (which makes configuration automation possible), it supports limited ACLs (which are good enough for my purposes), the SNMP and PJL support is quite good. It required no tweaking to fit into my existing infrastructure, and all of my custom reporting and monitoring tools worked perfectly with it. The consumables cost is relatively high, though. One toner cart is rated for 30k pages at 2% coverage and lists for about 250USD. So far the device tells me the historical coverage has been 4% for our jobs, and it estimates that the toner is half gone, so it seems to be rather accurate with its estimations. We typically push 30k pages per month through the most heavily-used copier/printers we have, so that's somewhere between 1 and 2 toner carts per month. It would be nice if it had a higher toner capacity. It also requires a fuser maintenance kit at 350k pages, which costs about $360. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- YOU MUST BE A LIST MEMBER IN ORDER TO POST TO THE LPRNG MAILING LIST The address you post from MUST be your subscription address If you need help, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] (or lprng-requests or lprng-digest-requests) with the word 'help' in the body. 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