I've been given a printer to review, one of these fancy printer/scanner/copier jobs, with photo-quality printing. Big printer, but it looks nice... all black...
Obviously I'm going to check that it works well with Linux. I have a Windows box to fall back on if necessary, but we'll see. Which brings me to my first issue...
I first looked up on OpenPrinting to see if the printer is supported in Linux. According to the page there, it "mostly works," which means that for me and your average Joe Bloggs the printer will work just fine. I read the comments, however, and a different story emerged. It appears that the printer doesn't work at all in Linux. Some Googling confirmed what the comments said.
So, being the stubborn mule that I am, I decided "well, I'll plug it in and see what I get anyways." And sure as Bob, all that happened was that the 5 sheets of paper I'd put in the feeder came shooting out with nothing printed on them.
So I gave up a bit on the printer for the moment, and thought I'd try the memory card reader in the side of the printer. I took the memory card out of one of our cameras, plugged it in, and the printer detected it and loaded all the photos. I was then able to print straight from the memory card, no computer necessary.
The printer came with some photo paper, so Hannah and I had fun. With 50 pieces of photo-sized photo paper availble to us, we decided to print out our wedding photos. What better way to stress test a photo printer than to print out as many of your wedding photos as possible? Also included with the printer were a few sheets of A4-sized photo paper, which we used to print out a select few photos.
I'm really impressed so far with the quality of the printing. The photos look stunning. Granted they are 8 megapixels, but even the A4 photos look like traditional photos, and only a closeup examination of some parts give them away.
This afternoon I decided to try something out mentioned in one of the forum posts I came across. I loaded up the Epson Stylus CX7800 drivers. Lo and behold, it printed a test page! Now I'll see what I can do with images, documents, and other general printing.
I've got this printer for 2 weeks, and I'll post back here with a link to my review when it goes live on IOL Technology.
