HP Laserjet1200

We left our HP 6MP in Malaysia when we left, and we recently acquired a Samsung to replace it. All aspects about the printer are cheap, especially the print quality, despite its rated 600dpi, it was printing curves with jaggies. I am not sure if this has anything to do with postscript. Lucky for us, after 5 days, it stopped printing for good, we decided to step up to a postscript printer at least. Despite the not so fabulous reviews on the web about recent HP printers, we decided on the HP1200 model with 8mb RAM and postscript 2 emulation.

It is cheaply made unlike our old 6MP, it doesn't even have a on/off switch, which is the most annoying aspect about the printer. The good thing is that the printer is ready to print in a few seconds, very nice. The output is good, only a postscript error so far printing from Freehand (a masked, "paste into" object) likely due to its postscript emulation program. Export it to pdf and printing from acrobat solved the problem. The printer is highly recommended as a bare minimal postscript printer.

Found these tips:

1. to set a default paper size, for example "letter" instead of "letter small", make the selection in "page setup" and hold down "option" key before clicking "okay"
2. in the print dialog, hold down "option" while clicking on the "general" popup menu, will show you the hidden "preferences" item, in it you can select "never send binary data". This option may increase printing time , but is more compatible with printers.
3. To print in background mode, without hangs, freezes, blocks, and other problems:
   1. Disable the HP LaserJet 1200 USB driver in the Extensions Manager control panel.
   2. Trash your old desktop printer.
   3. Open the Desktop Printer Utility and create a new USB Printer (but not an HP USB printer).
   4. Select Laserwriter 8 as the PPD and restart."
   

My other article of tips with postscript printers

Here are some links to other reviews on the printer:
Computers.cnet.com
Epinion
MacEase

Tuesday, 6 May 2003
Still printing after 800 pages on the first toner. It has issues with binary data format, print strange codes on many pages! You can set ascii data format from the print dialog box...