Laser Printing Issues (help!)

wyntirwyntir
Posted:
in Genius Bar edited January 2014
So I dropped $200 (-$70 rebate) on a Samsung ML-1710 at Best Buy the other day. I've been printerless here at college for a while, and it was getting to be a pain; I figured the lower per-page cost and high speed of laser printing would counteract the moderately higher price and lack of color capabilities. (A friend of mine recommended Samsung's laser printers especially highly.) Which it would, but the vaunted 17PPM speed is nowhere to be seen.



I can't tell if it's a problem with the drivers or the lack of RAM ("expandable to 8MB"), but even really small (44KB PDFs) files take forever to print. It usually works out that it spools for about 10 seconds, the first two pages of a document come out lickety-split, and then there is a long (5-10) second pause before it starts running the next page through. This pause is repeated for every page. When printing large (>1MB) PDFs, such as online copies of journal articles (hopefully a big use of this printer) the pause between pages is as long as 2 minutes. Needless to say, this is unacceptable.



Has anyone had experience with this sort of problem on OSX? I suspect it has to do with Samsung's shoddy Mac drivers. Could I print without them, perhaps with some sort of CUPS wizardry? Any suggestions in general?



If nothing else, any suggestions regarding which manufacturers support Macs well, if I could successfully return the unit (doubtful)?

Comments

  • Reply 1 of 10
    graphicumpgraphicump Posts: 82member
    What Mac do you have? How much RAM?



    What program(s) is(are) you printing from?



    Is it just text or are there graphics (the ML-1710 is noticeably slower with graphics)?



    In the print dialog, is Collated checked? If yes, uncheck it (you have to do this every time you print) - this slows down printing.
  • Reply 2 of 10
    wyntirwyntir Posts: 88member
    Good questions



    I'm running an iMac Flat Panel with 512MB of RAM.

    I have tried printing from Preview and Mellel, as well as web pages; as far as I can tell, they all have similar problems. Purely text pages print with the 5-10 second delay between pages, while the large PDFs I discussed (scanned from journals, essentially just big images) print with the 2 minute gap.

    "Collated" has indeed been checked. I will try later without and see if that makes a difference.



    In the meantime, I'm experimenting with GIMP-Print. Although they don't provide drivers for Samsung printers, some users have reported that it works with the generic HP LaserJet 4 driver. We'll see.
  • Reply 3 of 10
    wyntirwyntir Posts: 88member
    Speed test printing a 195KB, all-text PDF from Preview: 10 seconds from end of "Processing..." dialogue to first page beginning to print. ~6 seconds to print, ~6 second wait, then ~6 seconds to print the second page. This pattern remains pretty steady, resulting in a little over two minutes to print 11 pages. Performance printing from Acrobat is identical-except that Acrobat takes a huge amount of time to spool the document to the Print Center.



    And I haven't gotten GIMP-Print to work yet. It makes the printer switch on and make its "I'm about to print!" noises, but nothing actually comes out. Meh!



    I wonder if trying to return it might be the best idea.
  • Reply 4 of 10
    graphicumpgraphicump Posts: 82member
    I just found a driver on Samsung's site that has today's date on it:



    Samsung ML-1710



    And this one from Sept:



    ML-1710 earlier
  • Reply 5 of 10
    graphicumpgraphicump Posts: 82member
    And this was in the read me:



    Quote:

    About Print Center



    - There could be a problem when you add your printer at first time after installing the driver.

    This problem is due to the bug of Print Center of Mac OS X.

    To avoid the problem, please check the version of the driver after adding your printer.

    If the version is not V1.0, please follow the below steps

    1. Delete the printer on Print Center Dialog

    2. Quit Print Center.

    3. Reload Print Center.

    4. Add your printer again.



  • Reply 6 of 10
    wyntirwyntir Posts: 88member
    As chance would have it, I downloaded that exact file today. (The earlier driver I had was the V1.0, this new one is 2.0, but the download links and filenames are nearly the same, and right next to each other. What a confusing website!) I haven't had the opportunity to try it yet on a long paper, hopefully it will work better.
  • Reply 7 of 10
    wyntirwyntir Posts: 88member
    Hmm. No dice. I'll exchange the printer this weekend instead, the box said "mac compatible." Have all the receipts/manuals etc. still. I'll replace it with a nice inkjet, I think. Any suggestions? Or laser manufacturers who don't suck?
  • Reply 8 of 10
    graphicumpgraphicump Posts: 82member
    Brother has a good reputation....



    Here's a link to one at Mac Zone for $180...
  • Reply 9 of 10
    wyntirwyntir Posts: 88member
    Disaster averted! Open-source Samsung drivers at Linuxprinting.org saved my bacon. Wunderbar!

    Thanks everyone for your help, anyway
  • Reply 10 of 10
    graphicumpgraphicump Posts: 82member
    COOL! Glad you got it working!
Sign In or Register to comment.