this post was submitted on 21 Sep 2025
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I have an Epson EcoTank ET-4850 and it works really well. And even though that's not under $200, cheaper ink might make up for it.
Regardless of the model, what you want is a printer that supports CUPS driverless LAN/WiFi printing and the Apple AirScan protocol for scanning (which the model above supports both). If configured right, CUPS will just detect your printer and it will just work, no installing drivers, no choosing models etc., same with SANE for your scanner, without defining backends.
USB-devices are always a gamble where even minor model-number differences might entirely break support. Better make sure to check on the compatibility list and scour the mailing lists and forums for some crumb of information that your specific and exact printer model is supported and someone verifies it's working. Ideally test before buying, or not rely on USB.
Does AirScan on Linux work to scan-tohcomputer from the device? Or do you have to run [x]sane or some other interactive app on your computer? I'm wanting to use my R Pi as a headless server/backend that a scammer sends to, without having to use any desktop software interactively.
It works via SANE and so should work with all the standard scanning apps in Linux. Personally I prefer GUI apps because they give me lots of additional control (I use KDE's Skanlite).
However SANE itself ships a command line tool, but that needs to be triggered on the device that uses the scanner. However, I noticed that when the GUI app is active, I can start the scan with the button on the scanner, so there might be something that can be worked out to always have the scanner connected and pressing the button scans into a network share (or something like that), but that's outside my experience. If it works with any other SANE scanner, it should work with AirScan.
ok, thanks.