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Back in the 90's, M$ took over the PC world because Excel could print better than WYSIWYG or ALLWAYS or whatever it was called. You almost always got what you expected. Then there was Adobe Type Manager. Then Truetype. It was good to be a Windows user. You could always print. Printing was an inalienable right. It just worked.
Then came networking. It almost never just worked. Then came usb printers. Right about this time, printer companies started wondering how to make printers even cheaper. Let's move the page layout to the OS. Windows Printers were born. Chances are they no longer spoke PCL or Postscript. The page layout was done on the pc and some proprietary raw gibberish was sent across USB. It was no longer a good time to be on windows. The quality of these print drivers varied widely but almost all of them had some problems. I began to give up on ever seeing a printer that offered PCL or Postscript for under $1000.
I have owned numerous HP printers. The last 3 hp printers I owned were all "win printers". I have also owned Sharp and even Xerox (made by Sharp for Xerox). Again, these latter 3 printers were win printers. I was so sick of them. I've dabbled with Mac and Linux over the years but never fully expected to print. After all, the ability to always always always print is an exclusive feature of Windows. Or so I'd been trained.
I noticed that my Mac Mini could see one of our HP printers even when Windows could not. I was even told by HP support that the Mac driver worked better than the windows driver. Were the days of always always always can print under Windows drawing to a close? For me they were long gone. The kids used to come to me about 3 times a week saying "Daddy I need this report for school tomorrow and it just won't print". I downloaded and installed those garbage win printer drivers from sharp and hp over and over again until I got blue in the face. But on my Mini, I could always print (to the non "win printers").
When we made the leap this past spring to dump all things Windows and convert over to OS X, I fully expected to replace all those broken win printers. My wife clung to her windows box because she could still print to one of 2 hp printers and one sharp. This past week that changed. She asked me to fix her printer driver. I said "Use a Mac." She got my son to help. He couldn't do anything with it. In all fairness, it wasn't the software this time. The sharp needed a drum and the older HP had a different hardware failure. The newer HP had ongoing driver issues and she really couldn't rely on it. So she reluctantly agreed to let me swap in the Mac that had been sitting new in an unopened box by her desk.
Five minutes after setting it up, she could print to any one of the new printers. Earlier in the week, I had booted an Ubuntu live cd in my son's laptop. Once again, it saw all the printers in 5 minutes.
I was at Office Depot today. There was a long row of Windows laptops with their Vista soap bubbles running. One looked like it was about to explode. The bubbles were going so fast. I thought about what kind of CPU waste that screensaver was when fewer bubbles meant the thing got so frenetically fast.
M$ has lost their way. It's no longer about always working or the ability to print. Lately, it's about glitz and blitz and bull feces. M$ has forgotten that it's really about being able to do work and share it, especially on paper. I've gotta be able to print on time every time no bs no excuses. That was my experience on windows back before $49 USB win printers. That is my experience once again on Linux and OS X. Oh, and I should mention that the pcl based printer I'm using was $149 and today I saw it marked down to $99.
If you must use windows, stay away from win-printers with no printer language support (or at least avoid those which don't have a Mac and a Linux logo on the box along side that Windows logo). Stay far away. If you choose to use OS X, I can vouch for two brands of printers with well written drivers: HP and Brother. I haven't tried Canon, Epson, Lexmark, etc, etc. But the other day, I was doing an OS X reinstall and I was very tempted to uncheck the Epson drivers and save 1.5 gig of space. I left it checked. I like having 3 gig of printer drivers. It means I can almost be guaranteed the ability to print. Well done, Apple. It really is all about printing. Keep up the good work.
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You sir just made printing seem epic
On a more serious note, I have found CUPS to be far more superior to anything Windows has had to offer yet. It can detect most hardware, and needs zero configuring, it just works, and works really well.
*I use an Epson R300
It's all about being able to print
Discussion in 'Apple and Mac OS X' started by r0k, Aug 3, 2008.
