The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

[LCGuy]

So today i went to see one of my regular customers, and she asked me to set up her new multifunction device, as her old one had been "having problems", and as such she was giving it to me. Its a Canon ImageCLASS MPC200.

The Good:

After i removed the side covers and had a play around a while with the ink cartridges and the catridge carrier, i got it working

The Bad:

At first when i turned it on it gave me a "Error: 335", although thankfully i seem to have fixed this. And Canon has no Mac drivers

The Ugly:

Checked Gimp-Print, it doesn't support it either, meaning there's no way to get it to work on a Mac. Or is there? If there is...can you please help? Thanks in advance

Oh well, still not bad for free

 

[steve30]

My 2 year old Canon ip4000 works perfectly on OSX Tiger and OS9.

And my 6 year old Epson and even older HP LaserJet work on anything from System 7.

So, I'm happy.

My Canon CD has drivers for MacOS(X), I think. I can't remember, but they were definately avaliable on Canon's website.

 

[MultiFinder]

My parent's HP printer works great under OS X. Non-HP printers seem to be hit-or-miss though.

 

[The Macster]

Samsung seem pretty good - my laser printer has drivers available for Mac OS 9 and X, and they've made some for Vista already too.

 

[QuadSix50]

HP has been very good to me so far. My father's Epson all in one that he got with his Power Macintosh G5 3 years ago is already dead and never worked properly despite saying it supported Mac OS X. He now has an HP printer and is happy with it.

So far, Gutenprint has worked out fine for me. Now if only I could figure out how to get my iMac G5 with Tiger 10.4.9 to access my Samba printer on my Slackware box. The Ubuntu laptop and the Windows laptop can see and connect to it fine....it's just Mac OS X that has blinders on. :?:

 

[John8520]

I've used all HP printers in OS X, and one cannon in OS 9 (that thing was a total piece of junk) and all the HPs have workd flawlessly, even the print/scan/copy ones! The cannon in OS 9 had decen't support, but that didn't matter because the printer was a total piece of crap. It blew through ink carts and alyways jammed.

 

[joshc]

I've voted No because any good printer is PostScript and OS X can work with any of those without specific drivers.

 

[Patrickool93]

My Photosmart 7550 refused to work in OS X, even with the drivers. My HP LaserJet 1012 works great though.

 

[II2II]

I tend to stick to PostScript compatible printers because it is the only real way to ensure interoperability.

Buying a printer with a proprietary page description language is just asking for trouble. From the retrocomputing perspective, you simply won't find support for your old computers (in most cases). There is also the potential that it won't work on your future computers (may you change platforms, or the driver break on a new release of your OS). And for me, that's important since my printers tend to run a long time. As an example, my family bought an NEC Silentwriter2 Model 90 in 1992 and we retired our second one in 2005 (give or take a year).