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rushmore · Feb 11, 2003, 06:04 PM

My other post wasn't working so well.

If you have Mac OS 10.2.3 and an inkjet or laser printer under 400, could you please tell me how it works, if it works, and if you would recommend it.

There seems to be lots of good printers for the Macs, but I'm not sure if they work well with Mac X due to lack of driver updates.

On my short list right now are the HP Deskjet 5550 and the Brother laser printer HL-1440, but I'm not sure if they actually work well in the X world.

Thanks for your help.

OreoCookie · Feb 11, 2003, 06:27 PM

I'd recommend Canon (i550 sounds like a good deal for general purpose stuff, i850 if you want it a bit faster and i950 if you mainly print high quality photos).

Canon has had X drivers since 10.0!

The quality and speed are excellent and the ink is the cheapest among competitors of its class.

As for laser printers, I recommend Kyocera (specifically the Kyocera 1010). It has built-in Postscript, just copy the .ppd into the right directory and you are done.

The quality of both the printer and the print out is excellent. I've had enough HPs and the quality of the pinter seems to decrease every generation (at least the class we are talking about) and consumables are very expensive (HP makes about one tenth of its turn over with consumables!).

What type of printer you need, I don't know. If you mainly print (loads of) text, a laser printer is the way to go. I'd go for one the next time ...

Kronos · Feb 11, 2003, 09:59 PM

I myself have been using the Canon i550 and for a general purpose printer I absolutely love the printer. I paid only $129.00 and am very pleased. Also I am running on an iBook 800 with 10.23.

Matt

OldManMac · Feb 11, 2003, 10:49 PM

I use an Epson Photo 870 for color work, and a Samsung ML-1210 laser for text work. They both work great. I'm hoping to buy an Epson 2200 Photo this spring, although some of the advanced features (roll paper cutter), don't work in Jaguar.

schalliol · Feb 12, 2003, 12:04 AM

I have an HP DeskJet 970cse that I bought during the summer of 2000 ($399) and a JetDirect 300X (~$200). I'm guessing that you could get something similar for $400 now (I wonder if the AE base station could drive it). Of course you could use it without networking too.

I really like this unit in 10.2.3. The drivers previously were bad, but it works great now. What I really love is that the images are very smooth, but sharp at the same time, it doesn't seem to streak like others do, it DUPLEXES (double-sided printing), and it actually can calibrate itself using some sort of optical recognition system (it's awesome, a blue light it emitted and it must be reading in what it printed). Highly recommended!!

I Bent My Wookiee · Feb 12, 2003, 12:46 AM

HP's seem to have poor drivers, the Epsons seem to be good, my Epson c80 works great.

schalliol · Feb 12, 2003, 12:51 AM

When did you last try the HP drivers? The drivers under 10.2.3 are incredible. They were great in OS 9 too. They just had some issues getting OS X up, but now it's perfect.

rushmore · Feb 12, 2003, 01:07 AM

Originally posted by KarlG:
I use an Epson Photo 870 for color work, and a Samsung ML-1210 laser for text work. They both work great. I'm hoping to buy an Epson 2200 Photo this spring, although some of the advanced features (roll paper cutter), don't work in Jaguar.

Anyone have any luck with the Samsung ML-1430? there website is a totally mess and I can't even find the latest Mac OS X driver on their site.

Severed Hand of Skywalker · Feb 12, 2003, 01:33 AM

Originally posted by schalliol:
When did you last try the HP drivers? The drivers under 10.2.3 are incredible. They were great in OS 9 too. They just had some issues getting OS X up, but now it's perfect.

Last I remember was those thousands of people that had their computers slow to a crawl if they had 10.2.3 and HP drivers installed.

schalliol · Feb 12, 2003, 01:45 AM

Well, that's quite odd. I'll gladly recommend the config I have with 10.2.3. Works perfectly A+

Back up 15 and punt · Feb 12, 2003, 01:58 AM

Originally posted by Severed Hand of Skywalker:
Last I remember was those thousands of people that had their computers slow to a crawl if they had 10.2.3 and HP drivers installed.

You are talking about the drivers for the HP Photosmart printers (7150, 7350,7550), HP Scanjets, and all in ones. And these problems were not inherent in 10.2.1 but they became a problem in 10.2.2. Under 10.2.3 the problems with the Photosmart printers and the all in ones have gone away. The CPU usage problem only remains with the Scanjets.

schalliol · Feb 12, 2003, 02:11 AM

Ahh, so the printers are fine then, right?

solitere · Feb 12, 2003, 07:35 AM

Originally posted by rushmore:
My other post wasn't working so well.

If you have Mac OS 10.2.3 and an inkjet or laser printer under 400, could you please tell me how it works, if it works, and if you would recommend it.

There seems to be lots of good printers for the Macs, but I'm not sure if they work well with Mac X due to lack of driver updates.

On my short list right now are the HP Deskjet 5550 and the Brother laser printer HL-1440, but I'm not sure if they actually work well in the X world.
Thanks for your help.

I�m myself used OS X 10.2 with following printers with no problems:

Epson C80, HP Laserjet 4MP+, 8100 DN, 5100 and larger printers as Xerox Docucolor 40, Docucolor 50, Canon Gp555, Xerox ST255.

OreoCookie · Feb 12, 2003, 12:29 PM

Originally posted by solitere:
I�m myself used OS X 10.2 with following printers with no problems:

Epson C80, HP Laserjet 4MP+, 8100 DN, 5100 and larger printers as Xerox Docucolor 40, Docucolor 50, Canon Gp555, Xerox ST255.

Well, I use an HP LaserJet 8100DN and a LaserJet 4MX too, but I don't think these printers are options for a private household/small business, absolute overkill. Everything works here.

My recommendation is that if you get a laser printer, it should have Postscript 2/3. That way, all your extensions and stuff works out of the box (different paper trays, consumables, duplexing, etc.).

I'll stick to my choices. My personal printer is a Canon S630. Great printer, printed a lot of pages (if someone knows a way how to check out the page count, please PM me about it), no problems at all. At work, I mainly print with the HP 8100DN, the other one is its predecessor (slow as a dog when it comes to images).

Back up 15 and punt · Feb 12, 2003, 01:57 PM

Originally posted by schalliol:
Ahh, so the printers are fine then, right?

I have had some minor problems but in general the answer is yes. The only problem I have run into with my Deskjet 5550 is printing edge to edge 4 by 6 photo's. I end up with 4 by 5.5 instead.

rushmore · Feb 12, 2003, 04:13 PM

Originally posted by Back up 15 and punt:
I have had some minor problems but in general the answer is yes. The only problem I have run into with my Deskjet 5550 is printing edge to edge 4 by 6 photo's. I end up with 4 by 5.5 instead.

The deskjet 5550 is one of the printers I was considering... I want to mainly print just black text... how does it look? it says it has 1200 by 1200 dpi, does it look anything near laser quality?

And I assume besides your edge problem with 4 by 6 the printer works great.

Back up 15 and punt · Feb 12, 2003, 04:36 PM

Originally posted by rushmore:
The deskjet 5550 is one of the printers I was considering... I want to mainly print just black text... how does it look? it says it has 1200 by 1200 dpi, does it look anything near laser quality?

And I assume besides your edge problem with 4 by 6 the printer works great.

The text printing is very good. I don't think you will be disappointed.

rushmore · Feb 12, 2003, 10:08 PM

Originally posted by Back up 15 and punt:
The text printing is very good. I don't think you will be disappointed.

Cool.

Well I would prefer a laser printer, but I had an HL-1440 (I gave it to my parents) which is now only 200 bucks, but there were a few things I didn't like about it. The driver was quirky, the lights flashed all the time even when I had 1000 pages left on my toner, and it curled the pages a lot.

I'm trying to spend 300 or less, but the only laser in that price range that I see are the Samsung (which I don't know if they work) and the Brother.

So I figured that maybe I could get by wiht an inkjet for awhile and wait for a good laser printer to come out , or at least wait for companies to actually make OS X drivers for all their printers.

But if anyone has any recoomends on a laser printer under 300 let me know.

thanks.

Buck_W · Feb 12, 2003, 10:18 PM

Epson C62 on this end. Works fine, no problems whatsoever

bradoesch · Feb 12, 2003, 10:37 PM

Epson Stylus Color 760. Works great in 10.2.3, although it felt like it printed faster in OS 9. All in my head? Maybe. It still works great for me.

tuamigo · Feb 12, 2003, 11:06 PM

I'm running 10.2.3 with an epson 740 and a samsung ml-1210.

Like some else said, the inkjet for hi res color and the laser for text.

The epson drivers that came with os x work very well for the 740.

The samsung was really a problem for a long time. I bought it because it was dirt cheap compared with other laser printers. It also had a neat toner save mode. The driver that it came with was for an early version of os x, i don't recall which one.

Anyway, it ran kinda slow. I tried newer drivers from the samsung web page which did not work. It seems they have various drivers but none really do the job. For the longest time I was printing at a rate of 2 pages per minute on my laser printer.

It was awful, but the printer worked and I grew tired of trying to fix it, simply to find i had made the problem worse.

THEN, I found a website that suggested drivers for linux. I lost the website link, but here is the name of the file i installed: samsung-gdi-foomatic-1.0.ppc.dmg. (try to do a google search)

The samsung laser printer runs great. It now prints at spec speeds.

I totally recommend this printer know that alternate drivers are available. STAY AWAY from samsung drivers until since they are still beta.