OS/2, eCS & ArcaOS - Technical > Hardware

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

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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:

--- Quote from: Andi B. on February 09, 2023, 06:07:21 pm ---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?

--- End quote ---

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.

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