[WizOSX]

I have an HP Laserjet 2100M which I bought when OSX first came with machines (Fall 2001). I bought it precisely because it has built-in Postscript. Six months later I also bought a 1220. I would rate printing in OSX 10.2 (currently 10.2.8) as still annoying because:

1) It is slow in Office and Safari
2) The 1220's scan and copy features have never worked in OSX. HP had a sort of "dummy" interface for these features included but nothing was ever released after that.
3) Document margins are much larger than in Windows where I can go out to about .3" margins all around. In OSX I can't get more than about .5-.75" depending on document setup.

Printing is something that we do all the time and yet it seems to be an afterthought in OSX. The drivers feel like "leftovers" from OS9. Has Panther helped? Anyone had better luck using GIMP print in Panther?

[Brass]

Originally posted by WizOSX:
I have an HP Laserjet 2100M which I bought when OSX first came with machines (Fall 2001). I bought it precisely because it has built-in Postscript. Six months later I also bought a 1220. I would rate printing in OSX 10.2 (currently 10.2.8) as still annoying because:

1) It is slow in Office and Safari
2) The 1220's scan and copy features have never worked in OSX. HP had a sort of "dummy" interface for these features included but nothing was ever released after that.
3) Document margins are much larger than in Windows where I can go out to about .3" margins all around. In OSX I can't get more than about .5-.75" depending on document setup.

Printing is something that we do all the time and yet it seems to be an afterthought in OSX. The drivers feel like "leftovers" from OS9. Has Panther helped? Anyone had better luck using GIMP print in Panther?

I think you should complain about the Printer manufacturers about printer drivers, not Apple. Apple have tried to supply drivers for common printers to at least get them working, but it's really the manufacturer's job to develop to fully fledged drivers.

[nerd]

I see no difference with my HP 1200. It takes forever to print out web pages. I even maxed out the memory and it didn't make a difference. I use my Inkjet unless it's text.

Brad

[alphamatrix]

Well.
We have a HP LaserJet 4000N and a HP 7130 AIO Inkjet Printer Fax Scanner.

The 4000N works great with OS X most of the the time but on rare occasions it will take FOREVER to print for Safari (I'm assuming its maxing out the cache) this only happens once in awhile to it really annoying, it reminds me of how bloated OS X PDF exports can get.

As for the AIO, it been doin' fine with OS X. Its hooked up to a 1.25 Ghz G4 via USB running panther that shares it on our network with the other OS X machines. This is using panthers (and jaguars) builtin printer sharing so it has no scanning options, I'm not sure if HP has any shared scanning solutions for OS X. But I don't even see it as needed.

[PubGuy]

Well, the problem I was having with the HP 3200M taking forever to print with Safari on certain web sites is not a problem with Apple or Safari. The problem is with the selected printer resolution. A 1200 DPI bit-mapped image requires 4 times the data as a 600 DPI image. Certain websites are either graphics intensive or have large bit-mapped graphics that are reduced to fit into frames, but not optimized for the web.

Now, I don't know about you, but I can not tell the difference between a web page printed at 600 DPI to a page printed at 1200 DPI --> not enough to justify the incredible difference in time that it takes to print.

There is an EASY solution that you can try yourself. From Safari, select File --> Print. In the 3rd combo box, drop it down and select "Image Quality". Change the "Printer Resolution" to 600 DPI. Now go to the "Presets" combo box and select "Save As...". I named mine simply "600 DPI". Now you can easily switch from your default resolution to 600 DPI and back again simply by selecting the appropriate option from the "Presets" combo box in the print menu.

This has made printing web sites MUCH MUCH better. It only takes a minute to set this up. Give it a try. YMMV.

[JKT]

The Gimp-print software for the HP's isn't that great to be honest. What you really want is the HPIJS foomatic printer drivers. These are open sourced from HP to the Linux community (and ported to OS X). There is better support for most HP printers in that set of drivers whereas Gimp-print is a tad limited.

I have found that HP's own drivers for the three I use (LaserJet 4000, Colour LaserJet 4550, G85 AIO) in OS X range from being a stinking pile of dogshit to dreadfully mediocre at best. I also find that AppleTalk printing is diabolically slow for them, whereas (if you can use it) LPD/LPR is significantly faster (once spooled, that is).

[tritonus]

Originally posted by nerd:
I see no difference with my HP 1200. It takes forever to print out web pages. I even maxed out the memory and it didn't make a difference. I use my Inkjet unless it's text.

Brad

My LJ 1200 is a lot faster in Panther. Office was good before, but in Safari it's a lot quicker.

[mcsjgs]

New Laserjet print driver by HP here:

Download Link

[DVD Plaza]

Originally posted by nerd:
I see no difference with my HP 1200. It takes forever to print out web pages.

Weird, I've experienced a huge improvement with Panther with my LaserJet 1200.

Under Jaguar I would experience "lost" documents - ie if I printed say 4 or 5 documents then I'd only get 2 or 3 of them. Furthermore the performance was shockingly slow.

Under Panther I've had no such problems, heck I even get a picture of my actual printer

[nerd]

Originally posted by DVD Plaza:
Weird, I've experienced a huge improvement with Panther with my LaserJet 1200.

Under Jaguar I would experience "lost" documents - ie if I printed say 4 or 5 documents then I'd only get 2 or 3 of them. Furthermore the performance was shockingly slow.

Under Panther I've had no such problems, heck I even get a picture of my actual printer

I forgot about that one. I don't print much so that's probably why I didn't notice it was fixed but I remember that bug when trying to pring out a bunch of tech drawings.

Brad

[markhart]

I have an older HP laserjet 4m that took a painfully long time to print from Safari.
I swtiched from Appletalk to LPR and entered to IP address and a previous web page that took 10 minutes now takes about 40 seconds,
Hope this helps, Mark

[Moonray]

I don't have any complaints about the speeds with my LJ1200. Maybe someone can elaborate on how long is too long?

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