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Best laser printer for Mac?

M

Mala

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Nov 19, 2003
287
0
I'm having terrible problems getting my HP 1200 Laserjet to print in A5. The information provided by the driver is minimal, and I just can't solve the problems. The latest driver available is May 2002, as far as I can see.

(The pages either print right out to the edge, or else accept the left-hand margin I've set - seemingly at random - but they also start printing halfway down the page, and print off the bottom edge. This is on a PowerBook G4 running Panther, and Word X for Mac.)

I'm wondering if the simplest thing would be to buy a laser printer that works better with a Mac. What printer am I looking for?
 
A friend has now suggested that I get the Apple LaserWriter driver and use that instead, but I can't find a version for Panther.

Solved the printing problem temporarily, anyway: when I print directly, with the printer plugged into the computer by USB, there are no problems. It seems to be the AirPort printing setup that's screwy - and (typical) I can't find how to get into that in the AirPort Admin Utility.

I deleted the AirPort printer in the Printer Utility, and then told the AirPort Admin Utility to rescan, but it hasn't told me if it's found a new printer.
 
Mala said:
I'm having terrible problems getting my HP 1200 Laserjet to print in A5. The information provided by the driver is minimal, and I just can't solve the problems. The latest driver available is May 2002, as far as I can see.

(The pages either print right out to the edge, or else accept the left-hand margin I've set - seemingly at random - but they also start printing halfway down the page, and print off the bottom edge. This is on a PowerBook G4 running Panther, and Word X for Mac.)

I'm wondering if the simplest thing would be to buy a laser printer that works better with a Mac. What printer am I looking for?
Click to expand...
My recommendation is to get an Ethernet-compatible PostScript printer. All PostScript printers use the same Apple PostScript driver with a model-specific [optional] PPD file. There are numerous choices. Currently, I use a Xerox Phaser 8400DP.
 
Brother laser printers are getting good reviews, and they tend to be noticably less expensive than most of the other companies.
 
I've installed four different low to midrange Brother lasers for various clients over the past year or two, and I'm really liking them--were I to buy a non-color laser, it'd be a Brother. They're cheap, relatively compact, MUCH faster than anything else in their pricerange, and so far have been reliable. Work fine in networked, cross-platform environments or hooked directly to a Mac via USB.

That said, I've never really had issues with HP's lasers, either (their inkjets are another story). My office still uses an archaic 4MV on the network without issue, and a more recently installed high-ish end wide-format HP also seems to be running quite well. All are hardware networked, though, so perhaps there's a specific problem with the wireless bridge...?
 
Makosuke said:
...

That said, I've never really had issues with HP's lasers, either (their inkjets are another story). My office still uses an archaic 4MV on the network without issue, and a more recently installed high-ish end wide-format HP also seems to be running quite well. All are hardware networked, though, so perhaps there's a specific problem with the wireless bridge...?
Click to expand...
The problem with HP is that they're going to start country/region locking their ink and toner cartridges on new printer models.

Why are they doing this? So they can charge whatever the market in each country/region will bear and not have someone be able to save money by buying their supplies from another country.

So while HP used to be a great printer company, their current policies make them less than desirable to buy from.
 
I also purchased 4 Brother laser printers for my company. At the time, they were only a couple hundred bucks, and HP didn't have a decent mid to low-end laser printer option. (The ones where the paper stood up like in a plain-paper fax machine were junk, I thought.)

Anyway, not one of the Brother laser printers lasted a year. They were absolute junk. One of them was sent back to Brother twice for replacement before I finally tossed it in the dumpster. After that, I'll never buy a non-HP laser printer again.

In the past few months, I've purchased four HP 1150/1350 network printers. They're cheap ($300 or so) and damn reliable. I have an HP 1200 hooked up at home that I share between my Mac and a PC. The only problem with that model is it doesn't have an on/off switch, and I don't like leaving a printer on if I'm not using it for a while. Recently, though, I got a Color LaserJet 4550 network printer off of e-Bay for less than $200, so now I'm happy as can be!! :D
 
Wow, I hadn't heard that, Bear. Not that I ever spend that much time shopping around for toner, but policies like that really rub me the wrong way, so I suppose I'll be shopping elsewhere for my next midrange printer. Konica-Minolta-QMS makes nice wide-format colors, but never looked at their B&W options.

Unfortunate experience, Gerg, although so far none of the Brothers I've installed has had any issues whatsoever. The most severe problem so far I fixed today, which consisted of moving the paper stop from legal to letter (somebody bumped it and didn't notice, then wondered why the printer refused to print letter from the tray).

Two have been in heavy service for just under a year, one for two years or so, and the fourth (one of their big multifunction units) about six months. We'll see.
 
I have owned a HP laserjet 1012 for about six months with out a prob..........
 
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