Help with printing to HP deskjet 840c

[riko]

Hi

I'm fairly new to the Mac (got a second hand g4 power mac last december) and I'm having trouble with my MacBook and HP printer.

Although I've had my MacBook since June today is the first time I have needed to print. Connected up the USB cord and tried to print a 1 page pdf from preview. The result is hard to describe. The text is stretched vertically and has white lines breaking up the letters. Then about half way down the page it spits the page out and carries on on a 2nd sheet.

So far I have tried the following
- Changing the presents in the driver (was set to letter so changed it to A4 but still same)
- Deleting and re-adding the printer twice
- Resetting the printer queue
- Rebooting
- Printing from different apps (excel and pages)

But nothing has helped. If I use the guten print 5 drivers the prints will come out fine for text but photo printing is very poor.

Has anybody any ideas how to solve this? As far as I can remeber when I connected it up to my G4 power mac it printed no problems at all ( I can't check this as its currently in the attic). The printer is also fine on the windows PC is is normally connected to.

cheers for any help

Graham

 

[Sun Baked]

This is with the new HP Universal Printer Driver?

 

[riko]

yes, the one that come built into the mac. Version 3.3.

 

[jen3]

I was having this problem too and came across this thread hoping for an answer. Since I didn't find any help online anywhere, I thought I'd post here what I did in case it might help someone else. In Printer Setup Utility, show the printer list and delete the Deskjet 840c. Next click on Add, and if you've got the printer connected via USB it should come up again. Highlight it, but then change the line at the bottom "Print Using": rather than "HP Inkjet 3.3" choose "HP Deskjet 840c--Gimp-Print v.5.0.00-beta2", then add. Seems to have worked for me anyway.