Up until now I haven’t been able to print to the HP PSC 1210 printer connected to a Windows box in another room of the house. I would send a job to the printer from my Linux box, it would get there, but then the printer would just hang after making a few noises. It turned out that all I needed to do was find the little check box in the printer configuration on the Windows machine that says “Enable bidirectional support” and un-check it. It’s all working beautifully now.
For what it’s worth, if you’re looking for a cheap printer of decent quality, you can’t go past the PSC 1210. ZDNet says that Photo printing likewise was of decent quality for a printer in this price range.
My eyes can’t tell the difference between a print from the photo lab and a print from the PSC 1210 at the highest quality setting on photo paper. Of course, it’s also a scanner and a copier, so it’s a bargain for the $300 price tag that ZDNet quoted in March 2003. I’m pretty sure we picked ours up for less than $200 (new) in 2004. I think this model has probably been superseded by now.
