No action in printer forum: How do you like your printer drivers?

[rharder]

Not much action in the "correct" forum for this question. Hope y'all don't mind.

Which printer manufacturer has good printer drivers for OS X? Epson? HP? Canon? Other?

I'm curious to hear how they work for you. I don't have any printer for my Mac, so I've no clue how smooth or responsive printing is in OS X.

It'd sure be great to see a screenshot or two of interesting panels...

-Rob

[ElDiabloConCaca]

I've had REALLY good experiences with HP inket printers, especially my 940c. Epson's printing support early on was a bit shaky, but with the release of new drivers (available through Software Update) I hear most of their consumer-grade inkjet printers work well.

I'd buy another HP in a heartbeat.

[twyg]

I'd have to say, it took far too long for Epson to get their stuff together, but in the end it worked ok.

The simple interface makes it easy to get things fixed in a simple software manner... Check out the screen shots here...

Main screen

Nozzle check

Head kleenin'

While this isn't the most amazing looking interface, and in fact looks almost sloppy I'd have to say that when problems arise my users don't come running. I walked them through this interface once, and now 90% of problems they solve themselves. *Note on head cleaning the part that notifies the user "Only clean the print heads ... because cleaning consumes ink." Great attention to detail! Fixed the whole argument of "well, the images was blurry so I thought I would clean the print head thingy, and now it doesn't work at all!?" Of course I go over to find that the ink is dry due to wasted processes, and they've blown a 1" by 1" gif up to 8" x 8"... *sigh*

[Jadey]

My low-end lexmark ink jet works fine under OS X with their print drivers. My Xante tabloid size laser printer worked great since the release of OS X without any additional drivers. Our epson printers though... I wish at least our epson 1520 worked with X. Sure it's a few years old, but we don't buy tabloid sized ink jets often and we won't buy another epson one because of their lack of X support.

[.dev.lqd]

My model is a wide-format PS version 3 enabled printer.

HP's OSX drivers suck my left testacle and leave the right wanting more...

I have -yet- to produce good vector output from X. I'm hoping they'll release an update for their Pressready rip- which was AMAZING in terms of the quality and color reproduction I could squeeze out of it.

I'm also waiting for an update to SuperCal, which is a really really dope little monitor calibration utility. The patterns it uses are great when compared to the built in colorsync calibration wizard, and I'm able to get really nice gamma curves from it. Unfortunately, it doesn't work with my second monitor yet (it isn't multi monitor aware) so my second display is just sitting there, uncalibrated and in the cold.

OSX just doesn't seem to be ready or have the appropriate application support for low-end high-end printing.

Anyone else have different experience?

[symphonix]

Canon are very slack with their printer drivers: at the moment they have about half of their printers working under OS X. They still haven't made drivers for mine.

I picked up the cheapest, bottom-of-the-line Lexmark last week to try and get some rough work done in the meantime, and was very pleased with their drivers for OS X. A neat menu system with plenty of options makes it easy to switch media and quality, and all their utilities for alignment and cleaning are right there in the print dialogue. The printer runs quickly and quietly at 1200x1200 dpi, in 4 colour CMYK, and the ink reserves are the biggest I have seen in a "cheapo" printer.
The inkwells in my Canon are ludicrously small for the type of printer, and require frequent recharging.

In short, I was very pleased with the Lexmark. At half the cost of the cheapest printer from HP, Canon or Epson, I figured it would be only good enough as a fill in until I got my Canon going, but now I use it all the time!

Also, I have owned HPs and Epsons, but next time I'm looking for a printer, I will be checking out the Lexmark badge first.

[boi]

lexmark z22 driver doesn't work well for me. it will work one day, but not another. then i'll delete a job from the queue, wait two days, go to print something else, and it will print the job from two days earlier. seriously. it still prints papers i wrote last semester (well, it did once). i'm tired of fighting it, i use my friend's HP pro (980 i think?). it's great... but he's on a wintel machine.

[TommyWillB]

My printer seems to always work fine for a limited amount of time and then I have to delete it and re-add it.

This morening I think I may have made a connection to disabling AppleTalk and the printer dieing... It seems that the printer does not seem to be visible after disconnecting from AppleTalk and then reconnecting.

So far it has seemed that a random amount of disconnecting/reconnecting, deleting/re-adding, and powering down/powering up (the printer) seems to finally make it visible again...

The only other oddity is that Internet Explorer ALWAYS crashes if you preview from the print dialog and then try to cancle/print... I've stopped previewing from IE...