Thread
What would be a good colour printer for a Macintosh IIci?
So, I have a nice working Macintosh IIci running System 7.5.4 (yes, I have a copy). I am thinking of getting a colour printer off eBay. However, I also have a Macintosh SE FDHD (dual floppy) which I might like to print from in the future (running 6.0.8/7.0.1, or maybe 7.1/7.1.1 in the future). Any recommendations for a good, light (less than 10kg/20lb) colour printer?
I also have a Canon PIXMA MG6220, and I tried following http://www.vintagemacworld.com/osxprint.html, but even test jobs sent from the Raspberry Pi I did it with didn't print even after ~5 minutes.
If I could get the print server working it would be nice. Any ideas?
I also have a Canon PIXMA MG6220, and I tried following http://www.vintagemacworld.com/osxprint.html, but even test jobs sent from the Raspberry Pi I did it with didn't print even after ~5 minutes.
If I could get the print server working it would be nice. Any ideas?
I've used a HP deskjet for years on a IIcx/IIci. Now I need a "newer" one as they no longer make the green-cap ink cartridges, only the blue/purple ones. But it served me great for years. And it still works if there were cartridges for it!
Skewing it a bit - for a BW Inkjet Printer - nothing bets a Stylewriter II. They use the Canon BJ-01 cartridges.
Skewing it a bit - for a BW Inkjet Printer - nothing bets a Stylewriter II. They use the Canon BJ-01 cartridges.
Find a Postscript compatible color laser with a print server that supports Appletalk. On the Mac, install Adobe's generic postscript driver and use the PPD that come's with the printer's driver packs. HP also made a "business inkjet" line that had the above built in, but they weren't the most reliable machines.
Elfen, which HP printer/cartridges are you referring to? The older 25A and 26A cartridges that the 550c and 560c used are still available.
https://www.tonercartridgedepot.com/hp-51625a.htm
Elfen, which HP printer/cartridges are you referring to? The older 25A and 26A cartridges that the 550c and 560c used are still available.
https://www.tonercartridgedepot.com/hp-51625a.htm
Older colour laser printers are inadequate for photo printing -- capable enough for charts, line drawings, paint art etc. Modern printers (last six years, possibly older) can reproduce photos but may be expensive.
The reason I assembled the instructions at http://www.vintagema...m/osxprint.html was that I needed to print photos from older Macs using a cheap printer. Owing to the rapid development of Mac OS X, i decided to leave the instructions as a successful experiment.
tanuki65: If you can print an LPD test page from local host (ie the Mac running the server), I'd look at firewall problems. Check the firewall logs and settings. The LPD port (TCP 515) would need to be open to your old Macs and other test devices.
(edited for clarification)
No, I can't print a test page from the Raspberry Pi I'm using. Slow/experimental Gutenprint drivers? Also, I don't want to by a modern printer because I don't really want to pay more than US$70-80.
Edit: A black and white printer (with greyscale picture dithering like the StyleWriter II) is OK. Light (<10kg/20lb) is also good.
So far the best suggestion is a StyleWriter II. A new laser printer is too costly and an old one is too heavy.
Black and white and colour are both fine!
Edit: A black and white printer (with greyscale picture dithering like the StyleWriter II) is OK. Light (<10kg/20lb) is also good.
So far the best suggestion is a StyleWriter II. A new laser printer is too costly and an old one is too heavy.
Black and white and colour are both fine!
I have done the "create a postscript printer with ghostscript" thing before, but with Windows. Something tells me it works better with classic macs in combination with netatalk 2.2.4. That way the printer will appear in Chooser.
http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.2/htmldocs/configuration.html#printing
http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/2.2/htmldocs/configuration.html#printing
For B/W & GreyScale, the StyleWriter II would be good.
Check up on this, but I believe HP Printer Support on Mac goes to Pre-OSX system. Just go through the HP Printer Drivers to check. Check the other manufacturers as well.
Here in the NYC/USA area I seen Printers for under $70 BUT the starter cartridge is only enough for less then 100 printed pages and a new cartridge for the printer costs more than the damn printer itself! So they get you either way! I seen a Canon and an Epson all in ones at K-Mart go for under $80, but their cartridges going for a lot more!
Emulating a Mac with an R-Pi? I would like to do that one day. But I do know that you lose a few things when emulating a system, like direct printing. You can still print, but it takes some work.
- One way is to have the printer shared on a real mac and then have the emulated Mac connect to the printer through the other Mac through the network. But sometimes I hear, networking is lost on emulation.
- Another way is have a .pdf file creator and create a .pdf of the document and then take the file to the other Mac to be printed. But then again, you can do the same with saving the file and swapping it to the other Mac.
Second this advice. A color laser's output won't be quite as photo-perfect as the best of the inkjets, but it's better than so-called photo-quality ink jets of a few years ago. Also, there are no liquids to dry and clog print heads (no print heads).
It's tricky shopping for one though. There are a bunch of color laser printers available now which feature "host based" printing. Which means that the printer doesn't speak a standard printer language. It relies on the host computer to do the rasterizing calculations, and that means there must be a specific print driver for that printer, for your target OS. Obviously, you should avoid those.
Expect to pay about $200 - $250 for a good color laser printer with network and postscript support. The trickiest bit is figuring out whether the Appletalk protocol is supported. It appears that some printer lines still support it but don't mention it in the specifications.
For example, this printer is a good choice, except that I don't know whether it supports Appletalk. It may only support TCP/IP printing.
http://amzn.com/B004MSN4BI
When I was shopping for a color laser (six years ago), I almost bought the earlier Phaser 6180. I ended up getting a Kyocera EcoPro 170N, which has very similar specifications and was about the same price (~$250 shipped), because the 170N specifically listed AppleTalk in its communications protocol category in its specs. The sheet I have saved for the 6180 doesn't list communications protocols. It can be hard to find.
They'll tell you the hardware media (ethernet, USB, etc.) and they'll tell you the print languages supported (postscript, PCL 5, 6, etc.) but some times they just don't want to mention TCP/IP, SPX/IPX, AppleTalk, etc.)
Look for a line in the specs with TCP/IP on it, and then check for AppleTalk.
Every HP that uses a JetDirect network card supports Appletalk printing. The ones with "built-in" JetDirect are tricky, some do, some don't. The low end models usually omit Appletalk but HP's spec sheets are very clear about this. Personally I just buy laser printers used, but filled with toner cartridges. If you score a "workgroup" class printer, you can go years before having to buy toner. They all tend to go for cheap since laser printers depreciate like cars.
I'm not emulating a Mac on the RPi, I'm just adapting it to Raspbian. I think I'll try with my Retina MBP. I may try with my 700MHz iBook G3 some day.
edit: I don't want to buy a new printer since they cost >$80. Edit #2: I'll try Netatalk. Edit #3: I DIDN'T USE GHOSTSCRIPT!!
edit: I don't want to buy a new printer since they cost >$80. Edit #2: I'll try Netatalk. Edit #3: I DIDN'T USE GHOSTSCRIPT!!
CUPS should use Ghostscript if fed a Postscript file. If properly setup netatalk will handle the actual communication with System 7.x, it will then pass the Mac's output in the form of a Postscript file to CUPS which processes it with Ghostscipt and then outputs to your printer. Its complicated to setup, but it works.... somehow.
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?
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!
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!
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?)
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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!
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
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
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.