Printer with 'HP PCL 3 GUI, HP PCL 3 Enhanced' - or better Brother MFC-J6955DW

[Andi B.]

I'm thinking about buying a HP OfficeJet Pro 7740 printer but it only supports 'HP PCL 3 GUI, HP PCL 3 Enhanced'. Usually I have printers with postscript and/or PCL5(+) support. No I wonder if I can use the features of this A3 printing engine. I guess scanner will work the same way as it does with my HP OfficeJet Pro 475dw (smb, ftp?, email). Working fax isn't that important. But I need high resolution print outs on A3 page sizes (11 x 17"). Color, duplex and tray selection.

I'm pretty sure ported programs will work good enough with the help of cups. But how about the standard OS/2 drivers? PCL 3 seems pretty old but back at the days when OS/2 drivers where written I fear it was limited to 300dpi and maybe even color didn't work work PCL3. Any knows?

[Roderick Klein]

I'm thinking about buying a HP OfficeJet Pro 7740 printer but it only supports 'HP PCL 3 GUI, HP PCL 3 Enhanced'. Usually I have printers with postscript and/or PCL5(+) support. No I wonder if I can use the features of this A3 printing engine. I guess scanner will work the same way as it does with my HP OfficeJet Pro 475dw (smb, ftp?, email). Working fax isn't that important. But I need high resolution print outs on A3 page sizes (11 x 17"). Color, duplex and tray selection.

I'm pretty sure ported programs will work good enough with the help of cups. But how about the standard OS/2 drivers? PCL 3 seems pretty old but back at the days when OS/2 drivers where written I fear it was limited to 300dpi and maybe even color didn't work work PCL3. Any knows?

The experience I have had with PCL 3 is limited. I can only speak with the experience I have had with PCL's printers many years ago.
The experience I had was that the native PCL drivers did not work that well. So you might be better off to use Postscript printer.

Good luck,

Roderick

[Andi B.]

Any suggestions for good A3 printer with postscript? Seems even HP gave up.

[Andy Willis]

I have an (now older) Brother 7365DN.  It requires CUPS to printer here, which is why I ended up building brlaser to work with Brother laser printers.
A list is available here:
https://github.com/abwillis/brlaser
HL printers seem to have more problems but appear to work overall.

[Andi B.]

I found the Brother MFC-J6955DW which seems to have Postscript. On some sites they call it PCL6, BR-Script3 - which probably means it's not 100% Postscript 3 compatible.

Brother seems the only brand which have Postscript below 600€ now :-(. I've never had any device from Brother. I've good experience with HP. These printers usually lasts way longer than 10 years. I've mixed experience with (cheap) Xerox PS printers, bad experience with Lexmark.... Are there anyone else her with a Brother printer and want to share his experience?

Cups - I think there is not much problem with PCL or PS printers and cups. The mentioned HP 7740 is even selectable in our standard cups. No clue if anyone tested this. 

Andy, your Brother 7365DN seems to be a GDI (host based) printer, right? Something I want to avoid. But the Brother MFC-J6955DW looks very promising.

[ivan]

I have two Brother laser colour printers that work very well with the PSPRINT driver after I added the PPD for each to it.  You should be able to get the PPD from the Brother site under their Linux driver for that printer.

Mine are the DCP-9020cdw and HL-3170cdw
NOTE: you need to be careful when reading how to use PIN.exe to get the PPD into the PSPRINT.

[Andy Willis]

I have two Brother laser colour printers that work very well with the PSPRINT driver after I added the PPD for each to it.  You should be able to get the PPD from the Brother site under their Linux driver for that printer.

Mine are the DCP-9020cdw and HL-3170cdw
NOTE: you need to be careful when reading how to use PIN.exe to get the PPD into the PSPRINT.
[/quote

The pcl driver does mostly work with the 7365 but not always reliable for some jobs.  I never had any luck with the linux ppd files with psprint and did not find windows ones.

[ivan]

Hi Andy,
Did you run the cleanppd.cmd first?  My biggest problem was getting both printers to appear in the printer list.

[roberto]

You can look at:
In the Manage Printers program, in File ---> Import *.ppd
I have never used it but it can be very interesting.
saludos

[Andy Willis]

Hi Andy,
Did you run the cleanppd.cmd first?  My biggest problem was getting both printers to appear in the printer list.

It has been so long that I do not recall and at this point, CUPS is working well and it was an easy setup on ArcaOS where CUPS was installed anyhow.

[Dariusz Piatkowski]

Hi Andi,

I've used a couple of Brother Postscript printers with my OS/2 setup over the years. Once I had the printer driver adjusted (by importing the PPD) all settings are available.

The models are:

1) OLD - HL1650
2) CURRENT - HL5470DW

The only issue/complaint I have is that with both of these printers, when printing from Lucide (PDF doc) I occasionally get a PScript error at the printer, meaning: instead of a page I get an error page print out of some sort of PScript error.

No problem, I print all my stuff using GSView.

Both of these Brother machines support PCL6 (in emulation), so I supposed one could always try that if the native BR-Script3 does not work.

[Andi B.]

Thanks for the infos.

instead of a page I get an error page print out of some sort of PScript error.

No clue what your error is but it reminds my on my problems with the Xerox 6xx?? I had long ago. The fix at that time was to hexedit pscript to not send this one failing PS command which my Xerox did not understand. Luckily PS errors usually get printed in readable text and so sometimes can be deciphered. Unfortunately this Xerox failed after a few years of flawless use with a mechanical failure. Btw. the reason why I switched to my current HP Officejet Pro X476dw. But now I also want A3 ....