What would be a good colour printer for a Macintosh IIci?

[Elfen]

Only the ImageWriter II does color and that color ribbon is super expensive and nearly impossible to find.

 

[tanuki65]

Greyscale (with dithering for photos) is fine with me! Would http://www.ebay.com/itm/ImageWriter-II-Printer-for-Apple-IIGS-Prints-well-Model-A9M0320-S-N-1717647-/121641807733?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_0&hash=item1c526aaf75 be good?

 

[olePigeon]

That's a dot matrix printer, wouldn't be good.  You'd want at least a StyleWriter, though a Color StyleWriter would be nice.  I think they use Canon ink cartridges.  There's also an AppleTalk dongle you can get for the StyleWriter.

 

[olePigeon]

As mentioned already, the other option would be to get a nice PostScript color laser printer to use with all your computers, modern and vintage.

I have a Xerox Phaser 6600dn.  It's a fantastic printer.  Great quality, fast, and has real PostScript Level 3 built in.  I can print to it from my vintage Macs using the LaserWriter PS driver or the generic PostScript driver.

Costs $550 direct from Xerox, maybe cheaper if you can find it on sale.

I like it because I can print to it from any computer running any OS, from a Mac Plus running System 6 or a 486 DOS PC, all the way to my MacBook Pro with Yosemite and gaming PC with Windows 7.  Works great!

 

[tanuki65]

But I already have a Canon MG6220 and don't want to pay $550 for a printer! At that rate I could get 2 Q700s and an accelerator for my IIci! Which Colour StyleWriters have ink cartridges that are still available?

 

[olePigeon]

Color StyleWriter 2500 is cheap, and some Googling shows it still has ink from 3rd parties (and originals online, but I wouldn't use an original, probably dried up.)

 

[tanuki65]

StyleWriters that you can still get ink cartridges for today (May 2015): [sW=StyleWriter, CSW=Colour StyleWriter]

• CSW Pro
• CSW 2400
• CSW 2500
• CSW 4100
• More

 

[tanuki65]

I'll try the print server from rMBP with Ghostscript and Netatalk. If it doesn't work I may buy a Colour StyleWriter 2500.

 

[Cory5412]

olePigeon is really on the right track for this problem. I have a Xerox Phaser 6220EN and it has near-LJ4 compatibility. In fact, both over Ethernet and via parallel, you can just use the LaserJet 4 driver with it, as it supports both PCL and PostScript natively. It also speaks AppleTalk.

The model I have was new in 2006, so it may be possible to find inexpensively now.

It also does what I'd call surprisingly well with photos. I wouldn't charge a client for photo prints out of it, but you can use it to get an idea of what something will look like printed, and I used it heavily for "contact sheets" back in the day when I was doing all my photo processing on G3s that were really too slow to just browse through folders of RAWs, the way most of my computers can.

If you print with any frequency at all, picking up a good printer would be what I'd call an investment.

Another option is that most LaserJets and LaserWriters will do dithering and grayscale. They cost a bit more than a stylewriter up front, and the supplies cost more each time you go to buy them, but if you buy an LJ4 or LWP600, 630, or 16/600, you can buy the Xerox 15,000-page cartridge for them. (so, $100 for 15,000 pages or $20 for a hundred pages?)

 

[Cory5412]

That said, good investigating in terms of finding printers for which you can still find new cartridges. Do you have the model names of the cartridges for those printers?

Many LaserWriters use the same (often Canon-designed) engines that HP LaserJets used. The LaserWriter 600, 630, and 16/600 that i mentioned share a cartridge with the LaserJet 4, for example.

 

[Schmoburger]

That said, good investigating in terms of finding printers for which you can still find new cartridges. Do you have the model names of the cartridges for those printers?

The SW, SWII, and SW1200 used the BC-02 Black cartridge, And the CSW1500 used BC-02 Black and BC-05 Colour cartridges which are a Canon BubbleJet item (for obvious reason), this much I do know.

I beleive the cartridges in the CSW 2400 and 2500 are BCI21B/C and some higher capacity ones i think are available which from memory were BC20 and BC22.

 

[Trash80toHP_Mini]

As mentioned already, the other option would be to get a nice PostScript color laser printer to use with all your computers, modern and vintage.

I have a Xerox Phaser 6600dn.  It's a fantastic printer.  Great quality, fast, and has real PostScript Level 3 built in.  I can print to it from my vintage Macs using the LaserWriter PS driver or the generic PostScript driver.

Now THAT sounds like a plan! THX, oP! [] ]'>

The only color printer I had until somebody gave me a Huge@$$ Roland CAMM-Jet CJ-60 was the original Epson Color Stylus with the LocalTalk interface option, I got both on clearance at Staples.

Product Brochure: https://files.support.epson.com/pdf/styc__/styc__sl.pdf

User Manual: https://files.support.epson.com/pdf/styc__/styc__u3.pdf

I wish I still had it, but it went down the storage room whirlpool. If the cartridges are still available, I'd snipe another one set up like that of eBay in a heartbeat. The driver didn't support the 68000, but I noodled out the workaround for the unimplemented trap error when the PowerBook 100 printed successfully now and again. Highly recommended!

 

[CC_333]

We have an HP Color LaserJet 1518ni, which has PostScript Level 3 emulation, which probably isn't the same thing as having it built in, is it?

That being said, I guess it won't work under Windows 9x, DOS, or Mac OS 9.x.x and lower?

As modern printers go, though, it's perfect. And it works pretty well on modern computers.

c

 

[NJRoadfan]

It is built-in, it just means the Postscript interpreter isn't written by Adobe themselves. I think HP uses Phoenix Page these days. Given how good 3rd party implementations are (see Ghostscript), I wouldn't worry too much about it.

 

[tanuki65]

I have really moved on from printing, so I will not be checking in on this thread too often. Please note I already have an inkjet printer and don't want to spend $$$ on a laser printer.

 

[olePigeon]

It is built-in, it just means the Postscript interpreter isn't written by Adobe themselves. I think HP uses Phoenix Page these days. Given how good 3rd party implementations are (see Ghostscript), I wouldn't worry too much about it.

Yeah, but I meant that it's not a host-based printer like many printers are these days.  Having the formatter on the printer means you can print to it directly and not worry about the driver, so long as it's sending PostScript.  Many laser printers these days (especially HP) require the use of platform specific host based drivers.  The printers are useless on anything that isn't modern.

Annoyingly, the host-based printers often stop working for one reason or another until the drivers are updated to work with whatever OS you're using.  Our LaserJet 3600s often stop working right after an OS X point update.  We have to wait weeks (sometimes months, as it was for 10.9) for an updated HP driver.  As printers arbitrarily labeled "old" by HP and they stop updating the drivers, they're simply useless and you'll have to buy a new printer... which I'm certain is the entire point.

Even though the Xerox printers aren't host based, Xerox has no problems putting out an updated printer drive the same day as an OS update.  And even if there was a driver issue, I can always print as Generic Postscript.