Colour laser printer roblems

Jason_Bryan said:

When I print to either a Samsung CLP-500 or HP Laserjet 2550 my documents do not print central to the page. If I use my HP Desject 960c or 1220c they print prefectly. I have tried printing Word, PDF and Omnigraffle documents with the same results. I am at a total lost as to why this happens, can anyone help?
I have the same problem wether printing from my PowerMac or iBook running OSX.3.5.
Any help would be great. Thanks.

Click to expand...

This is not unusual. It is why some applications include boundary adjustments. Some print drivers include this feature, as well. Others even include aspect ratio adjustments. Your fix may be as simple as a selection in the Page Setup dialog to center the document on the page. As a rule of thumb, you have to readjust your margins, etc. after you switch printers.

2 Ideas:

1. Have you tried previewing as a .pdf to see how the alignment is?

2. Printer alignment?

I just set up an HP 2550L hooked up to my iMac G4 at work. Test page looks great, printing something simple like a web page out of Safari works fine. But whenever I try to print a high-resolution image out of Photoshop, I get endless pages of garbage text. The same image prints fine to my HP 5150 inkjet printer. What gives? I've tried researching the problem for hours and I can't figure it out! Help!

Jason_Bryan said:

When I print to either a Samsung CLP-500 or HP Laserjet 2550 my documents do not print central to the page. If I use my HP Desject 960c or 1220c they print prefectly. I have tried printing Word, PDF and Omnigraffle documents with the same results. I am at a total lost as to why this happens, can anyone help?
I have the same problem wether printing from my PowerMac or iBook running OSX.3.5.
Any help would be great. Thanks.

Click to expand...

Jason, I have the same problem with my HP 1200 Laser Jet using Word in Office 2004. I had save it to a pdf first then print. This did not happen using the last verison of office, but I have printing using the new office 2004 correctly. I did try in word manually adjust the margins but the image just got smaller and sell shifted. Are you using a printer server?

jimthorn said:

I just set up an HP 2550L hooked up to my iMac G4 at work. Test page looks great, printing something simple like a web page out of Safari works fine. But whenever I try to print a high-resolution image out of Photoshop, I get endless pages of garbage text. The same image prints fine to my HP 5150 inkjet printer. What gives? I've tried researching the problem for hours and I can't figure it out! Help!

Click to expand...

You tell us nothing about your setup. However, the pages of garbage text sound like a communication gap between your computer and printer. If the "garbage text" is somewhat legible, then it might be an interrupted PostScript stream. If it looks like random undecipherable symbols and text, then it is an interrupted bitstream. I can only speculate as to the cause of your communication interruptions.

MisterMe said:

You tell us nothing about your setup. However, the pages of garbage text sound like a communication gap between your computer and printer. If the "garbage text" is somewhat legible, then it might be an interrupted PostScript stream. If it looks like random undecipherable symbols and text, then it is an interrupted bitstream. I can only speculate as to the cause of your communication interruptions.

Click to expand...

Sorry, I didn't give enough information. I am back at work today and I've done some more work trying to figure out the problem. I installed the latest firmware from HP (version 20040624), so the firmware is good. I discovered that Panther's Printer Setup Utility listed the printer, but under the "Kind" column it said "Generic Postscript Printer". I deleted the printer and re-added it and now it shows up properly with "HP Color Laser Printer 2550L" as the kind. I take this to mean that the driver is now properly intalled. I ran Repair Permissions, which fixed hundreds of permission problems from HP's driver install. (For the record, I run Repair Permissions regularly, so a this would not have been a problem for installing the driver, and is instead HP's poor programming skills).

So at this point, I took a relatively small JPG image and opened it in a variety of apps. Printing it in Safari works quickly with no problems. Preview gives me more control and, again, no problems. Opening the image in Photoshop Elements 2 prints countless pages of garbage text. Does Photoshop Elements 2 not support printing to color laser printers? Do I need Photoshop CS for this? Or is there some other problem? I've looked everywhere for help and can't find anything on this.

My work computer setup:

iMac G4 800MHz, OS X 10.3.5, 1GB RAM
HP 2550L Color Laser Printer connected via USB

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

I'm somewhat answering my own question here, but I got the image to print in Photoshop Elements 2. I had to go to File -> Print Preview -> Show More Options and set Encoding from Binary to ASCII. Now magically it works. I don't understand why this needs to be done, but it works.