| 2006/11/30 HP Photosmart C6180 vs Brother MFC-665CW for linux and others | |
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2006-11-30 22:28
by Merlin
in Public
I had been looking for a multi function fax/flat bed scanner/copier/printer, with ethernet and wireless support.
First, when I happened to stop by Office Depot, I saw the HP Photosmart C6180 , which seemed to be a decent device. It was a bit expensive ($300), but I figured that if it came from HP, it would have to have great linux support, so I bit the bullet and bought it. Well, after several hours of configuring it, and setting up linux to talk to it, I came to the conclusion that I was somewhat disappointed. In the process, I also had to upgrade my windows/vmware image to W2K SP4 (I had no service packs before in order to keep the image as small as possible) so that I could try some of the windows software for the scanner. Printing did work pretty easily, but I never got faxing to work except from the command line and on the printserver, not remotely. Sending jobs through the printing system just would hang forever and I couldn't find an easy way to just use the fax as a printer from windows. As for scanning, it just wasn't supported on linux and required windows to work, which is quite disappointing. HP did put out the hplip software suite, but outside of a spiffy control panel that doesn't do that much for me, it didn't get faxing working, and it didn't support scanning... A few days later, I ran into the Brother MFC-665CW at Fry's while going to buy something else, and it turns out that office depot had it too, but helpfully was hiding it in the back and just did not feel the need to display it. That's disappointing because the unit only cost $150, supported everything the HP did, also had a build in answering machine and phone handset, and also had full linux support , including for scanning over IP. Go figure... Anyway, I ended up returning my HP Photosmart to them, and got the Brother MFC instead. I still need to spend some time to configure it, but it looks like a much better choice for half the price. Sorry HP, but your product was too expensive, inferior, and you even tried to sell out linux for your own benefit this past month. |