Printing (Was: iApps and if Apple should concentrate on them)

[Karsten Kühn]

Hello Donald

we use 2 HP 1200 Laserprinters with  an USB connection and one Apple 
Laserwriter 4/600 which is connected to the ethernet port using the 
Asanté Ethernet To LocalTalk bridge.

In brief, my experiences so far are:

All printers print in excellent quality. As far as plain texts or 
business graphics are concerned there is no difference betwen the HP 
1200 and the more expensive 2200 series.
In regard of its age, the LW 4/600 still is an excellent printer.

All printers work fine under OS 8.6 and 9.2

None of the printers works fine under OS  10.1.5

The LW 4/600 doesn't work at all

The two HP 1200ers are not printing any graphics from within the classic 
environment. Even if you just copy and paste a simple icon from a file 
or folder into MS Word or Ragtime postscript errors are  the result. We 
get dozens of pages with cryptic signs on them. After we accidentially 
tried to print graphics we have to shut down the classic environment and 
reboot it or, this happened about 10 times so far, reinstall the printer 
driver.

Every other print job fails in OS 10.1.5
The computer says, that it couldn't print and asks if we want to either 
cancel, retry or postpone the printjob.
We then open our print center, stop the printer queue, press restart 
printe queue and also click on the button "retry this printjob".
Then it works (most of the times)

Although our LW 4/600 has only 2 MB of RAM, it sometimes is able to 
print PDFs, our two HP Printers with 8 MB won't.
The cause may be that only the LW 4/600 has real postscript and the HPs 
only emulate it.

The USB cables are 5 metres long. This is the maximum length for an USB 
connection. But it also is the minimum length needed to place a 
Laserprinter ergonomically.


I don't think, that it is only a problem with the printer driver for OS 
X. Needless to say that we already tried all printer drivers available.
It's more or less a complex problem in/with the print center and the way 
how OS X is dealing with print jobs.
I have already learned that companies dealing with postscript do not 
encounter these devestating problems (they are actually devastating for 
a small company). But after having read the discussions on Apples 
support pages I must come to the conclusion that there are problems with 
several types of printers which only emulate Postscript.
Complaints about HP printers are quite often.

Honestly, I don't know what we are going to do.
I ordered an iBook by mail which is shipping with OS 10.2 Jaguar. i hope 
it will arrive these days.
I will then try Jaguar.
If it doesn't work either, well ... I don't know. We will ever leave the 
Mac Plattform or I will seek the advice of an attorney.
There aren't really much options left.

kakue
--
Peter-Kraft-Strasse 40
40882 Ratingen

Fon:    +49 211       / 934  81 87
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karsten.kuehn at web.de
kuehnk at t-online.de