I have an Epson LX-350, bought new a few years ago. It connects via USB (but there's also serial and parallel ports). When connected via usb it appeared as /dev/usblp0 or something like that, and yes just cat'ing to it worked. And presumably the customers who buy these things new want them compatible with whatever processes they already have (for the last 30-50 years), so it supports both ESC/P 2 as you'd expect and IBM's escape codes (which I didn't expect and the old matrix printers I had from the 90's didn't).
What's perhaps more surprising, my macbook had an inbuilt driver for generic epson printers and it worked. It was not very good, it printed as graphics but it was there for some reason.
Not sure about modern inkjet and laser printers though. An inkjet Epson I used to have once did support raw ESC/P codes though, but it was 20 years ago.
What's perhaps more surprising, my macbook had an inbuilt driver for generic epson printers and it worked. It was not very good, it printed as graphics but it was there for some reason.
Not sure about modern inkjet and laser printers though. An inkjet Epson I used to have once did support raw ESC/P codes though, but it was 20 years ago.