[ShortcutToMoncton]

Hey...my Dad's considering getting an eMac to replace his old aging iMac. The thing is, a friend of ours does desktop publishing, and he uses all Macs – except for printing. He hubs 3 printers to a single PC, which he claims you can't do on a Mac, and prints to all three printers at the same time.

My Dad is a minister and does a lot of printing for the church's flyers and whatnot, so he's all interesting in this. He'd rather an eMac, but he likes the idea of printing flyers at three times the speed (plus, for the money he'd get a much better PC, let's face it).

Does anyone know anything about this? Is it possible to hub multiple printers to a single Mac and print to all three simultaneously? I'm curious. I'd rather he get the eMac, because lately the virus and spyware problems on everyone's Windows machines seems to be rediculous.

Thanks,
greg

[C.J. Moof]

Originally posted by ShortcutToMoncton:

Does anyone know anything about this? Is it possible to hub multiple printers to a single Mac and print to all three simultaneously? I'm curious. I'd rather he get the eMac, because lately the virus and spyware problems on everyone's Windows machines seems to be rediculous.

Thanks,
greg

No, he wouldn't get a better PC. He'd get a cheaply made XP box, ready to get all the latest virus and spyware problems out there. I don't care how many gigahertz it's got, it's hardly better. In my world, better=the machine I don't have to treat like a toddler, who is going to hurt himself if you're not dilligently supervising him.

Anyway onto the useful part of the post- sure, you could do this. Plug them all into an eMac, turn on printer sharing, and share them all. Send 10 copies to printer A, 10 to B, and 10 to C, and they're all going to have at it. If the goal has to be "mirror what I send to any printer onto ALL printers"... that I'm not so sure about. Seems like it could easily be wasteful, when you forget to turn that off and want to print one email.

[aaanorton]

Jeez just buy a good cheap laser printer and be done with it. Should be plenty fast.

[Cadaver]

For someone who needs to print so much that he needs 3x the speed via three inkjet printers would do a whole lot better to have one laser printer. For the price of three decent inkjets you can easily buy a good laser.

[ShortcutToMoncton]

Not at all. He has a bulk ink system that works pretty good and saves on ink, and the printer itself only costs about $80 Canadian. And he can print colour, too.

You have no idea what you're saying, Moof. $1100 will get you a great, solid Dell machine that far outperforms an eMac. There's no denying that. Anyone who knows what they're doing would have few problems with it...but he doesn't want to have to deal with viruses and the like.

So far, not much advice. No one knows? I don't need opinions on getting a Mac or PC...that's just redundant. I want to know if anyone has an idea of the printing possibilities I metioned.

greg

[Socially Awkward Solo]

What they are saying is very true. A $300 laser Printer is much cheaper in the end.

[imikeDotMac]

Shortcut... at least your father is not still using a Mac Classic w/ a StyleWriter (my father is also a minister). I gave him and my mom my G4 Quicksilver to "replace" the Classic and give them a mac faster then their iMac.... and what do they do, use the Classic still. Why? Because it has a disk drive.
And on this post.... get a Laser printer. Yes, colour is great, if it's actually used for the church flyers/bulletins/etc, then stick with it, but one laser printer (such as the base model Samsung/Lexmark) is cheap and fast. Besides, I've noticed that with inkjet printers, you need the expensive paper designed for that printer in order to make the colour look good—so why print half quality colour print outs.

[OldManMac]

I have a 17" FP iMac, and I have a Samsung laser and Epson Photo 960 hooked up to it, and regularly print to both at one time. I have a 7-port USB hub.

[tooki]

Regardless, multiple printers is not a problem on a Mac -- never has been.

I would, however, point out that it would be best to either use network printers (even if this means using an ethernet->parallel print server on each printer) rather than having them all run off of one USB port, because you don't want things getting slowed down because of the USB not being able to keep all the printers fed with data. (This problem applies whether it's a Mac or PC.) So if it works great, good. If it slows down, move the printers to Ethernet.

tooki