I did a bit of research before I bought my multifunction printer/scanner, and decided to go for the Hewlett Packard C4385.
The price was right (Aus$ 129), the scanner was acceptable at 1200x2400 (optical), the print quality is good (I don’t bother with photo printing and all that guff), and it has all the usual card readers built in.
The best part though is the built in wireless. I was expecting to be disappointed when trying to use this unit under openSUSE 11, but boy was I surprised.
It pops up in ad-hoc mode at first configuration, you simply connect to it and change the settings. I set it to DHCP and then told my wireless router to assign it the customary HP printer address of 192.168.0.192, and off it went.
It setup easily, and the support under suse is astonishing. I even get a tray icon from where I can both scan and print, and it even gives the ink levels!
It was also automatically detected and setup on my server which is running Ubuntu 7.10 (for various reasons that I won’t go into here).
It’s not a top of the range unit, but it does what I need and I really wanted a unit that you can “close up” when not in use ,ie the paper tray closes and there are no wide open gaps for dust to get in, and this one does just that.
I was seriously looking at the Canon 610, but it is a massive unit, and the support under Linux is questionable. Plus I was really angry at my last Canon scanner when I tried to make a scan of a US $1 Banknote (simply for posterity as it is a foreign currency to me), and a message popped up informing me that it was illegal to do so!!
Note to Canon: It is NOT illegal in MY country to make scanned copies of foreign currency, so get your collective heads out of your rear ends and drop the “US law is global” nonsense please.
I am NOT impressed by that kind of behaviour, and refuse to be told what I can and can’t do by a lousy scanner.
Just wanted to share in case anyone else was looking for the same sort of thing.
Regards :).