Last year I needed to print of some colour booklets and the volume was so small that it worked out only €30 more expensive to buy a printer than get a print shop to print them. I had not a lot of time for research but I made sure to check two thing:
- That it would work with Linux.
- That I could refill the toner cartridges.
A quick check on http://www.linuxprinting.org (now http://openprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=HP-Color_LaserJet_1600) shows that the printer is working mostly supported. The mostly working refers to a problem printing colour from some applications. Fortunately one of these programs is not my pdf viewer so in applications where printing colour is a problem I just print to PDF and then print the pdf from the pdf viewer.
Unfortunately I discovered that just because people sell refill cartridges for the printer doesn’t mean that the will work. Well apparently HP have installed a starter toner cartridges or to be more accurate almost empty cartridges. My local refill shop then informed me that HP designed the printer that refilling it would lead to the toner leaking out. So I had no option but to buy new HP cartridges. Knowing both facts I would probably still have bought the printer anyway.
If you do have this printer and want to get it working with Windows you just load the drivers. Linux and mac have to load drivers into CUPS. On a Debian based system you can install the drivers as follows:
Install cups (common unix printing software)
aptitude install cupsys cupsys-pt foomatic-db cupsys-client foomatic-db-engine foomatic-filters-ppds gtklp foo2zjs gs-gpl cupsys-pt gtklp
Get the driver files from the Internet, move them to the correct directory and restart the cups system
getweb 1600
sudo mv *.icm /usr/share/foo2hp/icm/
/etc/init.d/cupsys restart
Once cups is restarted you can connect to it from your browser by going to http://localhost:631/admin
- You can the select add printer and enter any Name: you want. For example “My_Laserjet_1600” and then click continue.
- What you choose next is dependant on you but in my situation I selected the Device: as IPP and the Device URI: as socket:192.168.x.y:9100.
- Now you select HP as the Make:
- HP Color Laserjet 1600 Foomatic/foo2hp (recommended) (en) as the Model.
- Then press Add Printer to add the printer (you may be asked for a username and password). If all went well you should get a message like Printer My_Laserjet_1600 has been sucessfully added
You might also want to select Set Printer Options and change Page Size: to A4 and Color Mode: to Color but that’s up to you.
Gute Arbeit. Danke.