HP C4200 Photosmart Leopard Driver Issues
I got a new HP C4200 printer this Christmas and I was pretty excited because I haven’t owned a printer for a long time. This printer was pretty cheap and I got it for free w/ a reimbursement from Apple. It is one of those AIO deals.
Leopard recognized it right away and I was on my way, then I ran into issues..
The main issue here was HP and Apple didn’t join forces to make sure that the OS and printer played nice. If you assumed that Apple would make sure that their “bundled” printers would work flawlessly with their operating system, you would have assumed incorrectly.
Drivers for the C4200 were in Leopard, but the packaged CD that came with the printer was pretty much useless. See this a printer that also scans, but you wouldn’t know it by the software that HP bundled with it.
GRIPE #1 - I’m lucky I could even use it right out of the gate because it didn’t come w/ a USB cable - was this why I got it for free? If I dropped $99 on it I wouldn’t be happy.
GRIPE #2 - I could print, but I could not scan and Photoshop had no TWAIN support for the printer thus rendering 1/2 of it’s functionality useless. I was sans-scanner before I did some sleuthing.
Luckily there was some action on the Apple Forums with people as bullshit as I was with the driver situation. The HP Beta Drivers: Scanning Galore Thread on Apple Forums (seems to be someone who works at HP) provides some Beta Drivers for download. These drivers finally gave me the software I needed to make some scans and also added TWAIN support for Photoshop. Supposedly the drivers when finalized will be packaged with a system software update from Apple when the time comes but there are a lot of other people out there whose HP printers still do not work with Leopard.
Now all I need is for this “USB not connected” message to go away. Yes HP my USB cable is not connected even though I am printing off reams of paper and scanning whatever my heart desires… sure.
This is why I avoid printers. They kill trees, the ink is a rip-off, and they take up too much desk space.
Here’s a quick tip for Leopard Users out there that want to save some disk space: Wipe out all the files in
/Library/Printers
Popularity: 47% [?]
My HP worked right out of the box (its a 7200 series ink jet) but its not one of those AIO type jobbers. Other ways to save space on your Mac though is to delete some of the language support files and Garageband. Those are two that I remember reading which gobble up a lot of space.
left this nugget of wisdom December 28th, 2007 at 8:52 pm
Yes, one of the first things I did on Ashley’s Mini was remove all unecessary language packs with Monolingual - http://monolingual.sourceforge.net/
But beware. When I wiped out my extraneous language packs my copy of Quicken 2007 started crashing out of no where, the support site was useless I ended up getting to the bottom of it via the Console. Some great software that Quicken….
left this nugget of wisdom December 28th, 2007 at 9:19 pm
I completely agree - I hate printers.
Printers are like pickup trucks and CD burners in 1997. You never want to own one, because all your friends will be bugging the shit out of you to use it, but you also never want to be far from a friend who does own one.
left this nugget of wisdom December 28th, 2007 at 11:57 pm