Any of you printer experts out there … having go fed up with the slowness of my Epson inkjet printer, and discovered that a Brother HL-2140 with a 1500 sheet starter cartridge would set me back less than the cost of two sets of ink cartridges for the Epson … and that a standard Brother cartridge would cost about USD 10, i.e. less than a dollar more than a single one of the 6 cartridges the Epson needs …
The Brother is basically great … very quick, quiet, smaller footprint than the Epson …
What’s the problem? It seems to choke up and throw an error when I send it pages with lots of type … or even when I printed a notice with only about 10 short words on it in 72 point type … It tells me I might need to reduce the size of my (non-existent) graphic. I have it connected through an Airport Express with Airtunes, or the main Time Capsule. I’m assuming that it’s being sent the data too quickly so that its memory gets filled up and doesn’t clear fast enough. (1) Am I right? (2) Does anyone know if it’s possible to upgrade the memory on a Brother printer? (3) Any other suggestions?
Don’t install the software from brother. If you did, cry. Then pay someone you trust with a lot of tech savvy to work on getting the brother software off your system. If you are brave you can search the net and see if you are comfy doing it yourself. Sorry.*
That out of the way this system has been supported with default cups drivers since 10.5 Set up a new printer in system preferences using the OSX default drivers for the printer. Let me know if that helps.
Hopefully brother has gotten smarter since their last round of releases, but I doubt it. If you didn’t install the software then you can just mumble about me under your breath.
Both computers running the latest CUPS drivers for Brother printers (on OS 10.6.1) … upgraded as soon as I set it all up. The Brother disk is totally untouched.
Good idea … I’ll try that. I’d prefer it to be on the wireless network. By the way, the Epson never had this problem. I’ve still got that, though I need to do some study-reorganising so that I have somewhere to set it up.
I’ll try running the Brother straight off the MBP, and let you know what happens.
You should be able to run it off the network. There may be some settings that you need to tweak. I will need to research it a bit which means that you will need to remind me. A few times. Sorry…
Update for Jaysen … and anyone else who found the thread potentially useful.
I never got round to connecting the printer directly to the MBP, but, touch wood, it seems to have made up its mind that running off an air-tunes connection is no bad deal, as I have had no more trouble with it … and that feels like tempting fate.
On the other hand, system update has just provided me with a new set of Brother drivers of OS-X, so let’s hope that they haven’t introduced any glitches!
On another hardware note, I’ve just invested in an Epson V30 scanner, which seems to be working really well. The software off the Epson DVD is complete rubbish … most of it won’t work at all under 10.6 … I think it was written for 10.3 and hasn’t been upgraded, and it fills your Applications folder with Windows-style junk (It gives me an idea why Windoze has something that seems to be called a registry, 'cos working out what application each of those files and folders is part of is beyond attempting!) On the other hand, the driver works, and Copy Machine downloaded from the Epson website does work to send stuff straight from the scanner to the printer, though.
I am using it with PDFPen Pro, software that I bought some time ago to make filling in PDF reference forms easy. The current version comes with OCR, which I have found to be amazing. With stuff scanned straight in, it will OCR it in a matter of seconds, making it copy-able to transfer into a wordprocessor or Scrivener. I also tried it with some photocopied pages of a book, where there were bands down the page where the copy faded out … it even got most of those pages, including a good shot in places at the faded bits … they needed some correcting, but much quicker than typing out a whole page.
Now if only there were an OCR extension covering Chinese!
It’s a wonderful idea, but … you must remember I’m in the world of Micro$haft where 99.9% of people don’t even know that there are other browsers apart from IE, let alone an operating system other than Windblows. The ones who do know there is an alternative are the ones that I teach … they see the Apple on my MBA and some of them register that my computer is different. It still takes 10 minutes to explain to the ones who come up at the end of the class and ask me to copy my “Powerpoint” presentation onto their USB stick that it’s not Powderpoint, and that it would take me more time than I care to spend exporting it, changing the font and font size on every slide, changing all the transitions so that they didn’t look like a dog’s dinner on the .ppt etc. etc.
Actually, there is one … she’ll be the third student and the fifth friend … who, under my influence is on the point of purchasing a MacBook Pro. Her original plan was a ThinkPad T400, but between me and a friend in the States she registered that a T400 with more or less the same specifications as a 13" MBP was actually more expensive … but she’s an interpreter, not a programmer.
I only know of two Chinese produced apps for the Mac: the official QQ client, which even Windoze users find really ugly; IMKQIM, a brilliant alternative to the standard Apple Chinese entry system, which really is good.
But I think I might get in touch with the developers of PDFPen Pro and ask what it would take; and perhaps I should get in touch with the developers of IMKQIM and see what they think.
