Comment by gandalfian
3 years ago
Yeah I'm struggling. Last 15 years I bought £50 multifunction brother or canon printers with separate ink cartridges and fake ink for a £1 a cartridge. Wore the heads out in about five years, repeat. Now they seem to have disappeared, all the cheap canons have combined colour ink cartridges not separate. A colour laser multifunction is expensive and may have pricey toner too. People here seem to like the Epson Ecotanks but the reviews say they struggle on anything but thin paper. The canons megatank look a bit better but still £200 for a fairly basically built printer. You really need wifi for airprint as its not clear that OSX will have much usb printer support in future. Which leaves you paying £250 for something like a G650 megatank Canon. I partly blame the home printer market shrinking due to everyone going paperless but suddenly being faced with paying more for a printer than I did for my desktop PC is irritating. (I did suggest a basic laser but everyone said nooo we need colour and copying).
> You really need wifi for airprint as its not clear that OSX will have much usb printer support in future.
Or you just connect a raspberry pi to the printer.
> You really need wifi for airprint as its not clear that OSX will have much usb printer support in future.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding the complexity of printers (actually, almost certainly I am), but isn't OSX support on printers just "let the manufacturer handle it"?
I'd imagine the least amount of effort they could do is support postscript via USB and leave it at that...
Why do you think OS X will remove USB printer support in the future? I can't find any articles about that or anything hinting at that on the CUPS release notes.
I may be wrong, and its poorly phrased, but when a new version of OSX has required updated printer drivers I've had the impression that manufacturers have been less inclined to provide updated drivers. Generally the answer given is use airprint. But if you saved 30 bucks buying the non wifi printer that doesn't do you much good... So if I buy the non wifi model will it still be usable in a few OSX versions/years? I think it may be a lottery but I may be wrong. Airprint looks like a more generic standard that won't require you do get updated software from the manufacturer.