Hey, sorry if this isn’t the right place to ask this (feel free to show me the way). I want to get myself a printer that can also scan. Main purpose is to not have endless sheets of paper laying around, but to scan Documents I recieve and then throwing them away so that I only have them digitally and can print stuff out only when I need them. Now I know that printers are the worst piece of hardware known to man and my needs not office-level.It doesn’t have to have any more buttons or features than are needed to scan a doublesided document and print them, without clogging/eating paper, and print black and white text without complaining about being low on yellow ink.
So my question generally is: what is the most minimalist, non-bullshit printer/scanner that I could get? But since all my devices run Linux I figured I’d just ask this here. Are there any big issues I have to look out for? Brands to avoid? (i.e nvidia being a no go for a lot of linux users) Preferably
Fortunately for me, both my printer and scanner have worked flawlessly with Linux from day one (notwithstanding some CUPS shenanigans where it had problems finding USB printers, but that has nothing to do with the printer). Unfortunately for you, that means they are both fairly old already and probably not available as those specific models anymore.
My scanner is a Canon Canoscan LiDE 220. It’s a fairly small model with a scan area just barely bigger than an A4 page. That suits me fine as someone who rarely actually scans stuff, as I can just stash it somewhere when I don’t need it and pull it out when I do.
My printer is a Brother HL5340DL. It’s about as big as you would expect for a personal laser printer (so not exactly handy anymore, but most people should be able to make it fit). It’s ten years old now, cost somewhere around a hundred Euros when new, survived two moves and still works flawlessly, including the duplex function. When setting it up in CUPS, I found the generic PCL drivers to work much better than the Brother-specific ones. Just as a hint for others.
When looking for a scanner, check the SANE database: http://www.sane-project.org/sane-mfgs.html
Edit: I forgot something, my scanner does not work “flawlessly” after all: If I scan at low or medium resolutions, the scan results get messed up. It looks like the scanner software gets confused about how long exactly each scan line is supposed to be and puts the line breaks in the wrong places. That’s probably a bug in sane-backends, but I have never followed up on that one, because my workaround is simple and works fine for me: Just scan at 1200 dpi and then downscale stuff. Still a bug though, and saying the scanner works flawlessly would be wrong.
The one thing I can’t seem to get CUPS to do is share my printer with the LAN. I had it for a while where it would show up on the Macs, but then would vanish. It’s my only gripe.