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HOME TOPICS ABOUT ME As far as I know, Lexmark is the first printer manufacturer to offer its own Linux drivers. |
technofile Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983 Lexmark Z52: Fast color printing, from Windows and Linux (and Macs, too)Enter the Technofile / Stars Magazine photo contest Jan. 7 , 2001 By Al Fasoldt Copyright ©2001 Al Fasoldt Copyright ©2001, The Syracuse Newspapers Windows users have it lucky. They can choose just about any printer. But Linux users live in a different world. Many modern color inkjet printers are designed to work only under Windows. These so-called "Winprinters" are useless when connected to a Linux PC. But Lexmark, one of the world's largest printer manufacturers, is starting to change all that. Lexmark supplies software, called "drivers," for Linux computers for some of the models in its current line. As far as I know, Lexmark is the first printer manufacturer to offer its own Linux drivers. Cynics might wonder why it took Lexmark so long -- after all, Linux is the fastest-growing operating system in the history of personal computers, and already has more users than every other system except Windows -- but the fact that Lexmark is ahead of all other printer companies is good news no matter what. Two consumer printers that have Linux drivers are the Z32, which sells for about $70, and the Z52, which costs about $180. Lexmark also has Linux drivers for its heavy-duty business-oriented printers, including both black-and-white and color laser models and multi-function printers. I tested a Lexmark Z52 printer under Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Mandrake Linux 7.1. The Z52 looks a lot like the printer I have at home, a Lexmark Z11, and produces the same high-quality color prints. But the Z52 prints pages much more quickly. Another difference: The Z52 comes with both a standard connecting method (a parallel port) and a USB port. USB makes printer hookup a dream. You could easily have a dozen USB printers hooked up to one PC, for example, just by using an inexpensive USB hub. Or you could do as I did and connect all USB devices to one PC and share them across a network. (Our home network has a USB scanner, a couple of USB hubs, a USB external drive and a USB printer. All can be accessed by any of the Windows and Linux PCs on the network.) You could even hook up a printer that has both parallel and USB connections to two non-networked computers at the same time, connecting the parallel cable to one computer and the USB cable to the other. The Linux printer software worked very well. There was no difference in performance under Windows and Linux. Both drivers offered the same advanced settings. Photographic prints looked beautiful no matter which operating system we used. The printer did well with normal pages, too. One problem: Because of a glitch during installation on my system, the Linux Z52 driver wiped out my Linux DeskJet driver. I doubt this would happen in a normal installation. Unlike my single-cartridge Z11, the Z52 uses two print cartridges, one for black ink and one for color ink. Both are needed for color printing, but if the color cartridge runs out of ink, you can print black-and-white pages. The black cartridge supplies a rich, dark tone to color images, according to the folks who design printers. But in actual use I found no advantage to the two-cartridge system. I printed the same digital images on both printers and found them about the same. Some looked better on the Z11 and some looked better on the Z52. That means I could hardly recommend the Z52 in terms of print quality. The Z11 and Z12 (the current version of the Z11) do just as well. But if you need a faster printer than the Z11 or Z12, the Z52 could be ideal. Pages printed in about one-third the time. Macintosh users should note that Lexmark also has Macintosh printer drivers for many of its printers. There also are drivers for OS/2 and Windows 3.1. To find out if there is a driver for your current Lexmark printer, go to http://support.lexmark.com. For a list of all the Lexmark printers that can be used under Linux, go to http://www.lexmark.com/printers/linuxprinters.html. |