HP drivers for PSC1315 printer

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aicul

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As numerous people, I bought an HP (printer-scanner-copier) color printer for my Mac.

First and upmost. This is a great little piece of equipment like most HP products. Color prints are speckless, scanning and coping simple.

However, there are drawbacks, I believe mainly due to a 1-to-1 porting of the PC drivers/utilities to the Apple world.

1. The print driver, never remembers settings for the printer (such as paper type, print quality, etc.) even if these settings have been specifically saved.

2. The scanner actually does what it wants. I mean what it wants. Do not expect it to carry out the settings you define. The scanner utility is more than bugged. It is just not programmed correctly. Will slowly drive you crazy.

3. The copier function works if you rely on the buttons (ie. copy) on the printer. However, do not attempt to set any of its parameters with the HP utility. They will not set.

4. The print driver hangs, or uses a new verson of snail-print I've never seen before. Normally a halt job-start job clears "something".

5. The install for the HP utilities costs 400Mb of disk space. That is because HP have kindly provided IRIS OCR, and other tools. A "Custom" install would have been welcome. The install also does various updates to your desktop-dock and startup prefs without warning.

I must conclude that if the printer is excellent, the software provided to drive this hardware is well below my expectations.
 
I had an HP PhotoSmart 1215 for a couple of years. Loved it. Thought it was a great product under Windows and Linux. On OS/X it was an absolute piece of major pain in the arse to use. I sold it on EBay and got an Epson Stylus Photo RX500 in its place. It's also well supported on Windows and Linux, is well supported on OS/X and is just as easy to use.

Yes, I sold a printer I loved and got one with better Native OS/X support when I bought my Apple.

This is after wrestling with it for 3 weeks and being a very knowledgeable technical professional. Some products just don't cross over well. (sigh)
 
The software for my new HP Photosmart 2710 are horrible too. I got it for Christmas primarily for my PowerBook to replace our old PC-only HP 722c (which I did get working with the Unix drivers, though it printed green instead of black...)

If it wasn't for the fact that I already sent in all the rebates on the printer I would've returned it. The first problem I noticed was that if you try to setup a custom paper size, the printer will only print one page, not all the pages you tell it to. I reported the problem to HP and was told that it was a problem with any version of 10.3. Nice, it's only been out since October 2003 and the printer was new in '04! The scanner software stinks, looks like it was made in one day. Sometimes it won't communicate with the networked scanner anyway. (Supposedly it doesn't work well with multiple users, but I haven't tried that yet.)

They released an update in Feb. that update actually screwed up the drivers more. Then, this month they released another update. This update added some nice things, like finally being able to adjust the overspray of the borderless prints (something my Canon could already do). However, I still can't print a document with less than a .5" bottom margin because of this known issue.
 
I also got a multifunctional HP PSC 1315. I'm fine with it as a text or fast copier or a simple scanner. Besides the problems mentioned above, I got one when trying to customize a Folio page format to print my scores. The print driver doesn't offer it by default. Options are Letter, Legal, A4, A5, etc. But when I start printing with customized sizes of paper, I always get my scores headers cut out. The only way I found to make presentable is to choose Legal as format, to cut the top margin away in Finale layout options. A similar problem told by BToth. Any clue? Thanks!
 
By the way I just downloade hp all-in-one installer version 2.0 from HP support page. HP Director version 7.1.4. Printer Driver version 6.9.1
System Panther 10.3.9. Thanks again.
 
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