[Sussex] Argos Catalogue surprise

[Steven Dobson]

On Fri, 2006-11-10 at 09:06 +0000, Jon Fautley wrote:
> Gavin Stevens wrote:
> > I was idly leafing through the new Argos catalogue & came across the
> > page for printers & suchlike.
> > 
> > To my great surprise, the Samsung laser printer (£79.99) said "OS
> > compatibility: Windows 98/ME/2000/XP, various Linux OS including Red
> > Hat, Caldera, Debian, Mandrake, Slackware, SuSE & TurboLinux".
> 
> That's almost certainly the ML1610 - they're FANTASTIC printers, and
> yes,they work with basically anything (they talk PostScript or somesuch
> standard language).

According to LinuxPrinting [1] the printer does support Postscript.

> Very cool - and well worth the money :)

The power of a published standard.  But using a standard that is already
in use you have a larger market than if you use develop some propriety
interface where you need to create a driver for each OS platform.

I'm not so sure Sumsung are after the "Penguin Pound" as it is after the
"Pound" in general.  I haven't seen the documentary proof but I have
heard it said that Linux now has a larger slice of the desktop than Mac.
I guess that Macs still use Postscript, so supporting Postscript gets
you into both the Mac and Linux markets.

For hardware producers supporting as many OSs as possible is just good
economic business.  The profit comes from the hardware sale (and for
some the support thereof); software is just the enabler that allows a
customer to use your product.

Steve

[1]
http://www.linuxprinting.org/show_printer.cgi?recnum=Samsung-ML-1610
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