Friday, August 25, 2006

Samsung ML-1610 and Mac OS X

Update Dec. 2008: I've recently upgraded to Mac OS 10.5, and had to go through the process of installing the printer again. However this time around it seems that a driver for the Samsung ML-1710 is available on Samsung's Australian site. The ML-1710 driver appears to work perfectly with the ML-1610 under Leopard for me on my Intel Macbook.

Update Nov. 2007: The instructions below are for PowerPC Macs only, and don't work on Intel based machines. However there is still a way to get the printer working, at least under Mac OS 10.4, I haven't tried under Leopard yet. Download and install the PowerPC version of ESP Ghostscript from Sourceforge (espgs-7.07.1.ppc.dmg) and then the PowerPC Samsung GDI drivers (samsung-gdi-foomatic-1.0.ppc.dmg) from OpenPrinting.org. Make sure the printer is plugged in during the installation. Then go ahead and set up the printer as normal from the Print & Fax preferences, but select "ML-1210 Foomatic + GDI" as your printer when asked. Despite having just installed the PowerPC drivers, and unlike the official Smasung drivers for the ML-1740 I talked about below, these seem to work okay, at least for me as my ML-1610 is now working fine with my Intel Macbook.

I've been on the look out for a cheap laser printer for a couple of weeks, and in the end I picked up a Samsung ML-1610 laser printer from eBuyer for £49.99. Since it was advertised as being supported by Linux I just presumed that it would work out of the box under OS X. Unfortunately not, and I've just spent half an hour or so tinkering getting it working.

It turns out that the ML-1610 natively supports Microsoft's Graphics Device Interface (GDI) via the Samsung Printer Language (SPL) and after running across Jeff Boulter's post about drivers he'd managed to find which supported the Samsung ML-1740, it turned out that these were actually generic SPL drivers and, despite not explicitly saying so, supported the ML-1610 just fine.

So now that I have it working directly via USB, does anyone know if there are problems with the ML-1610 and either of the D-Link DP-G310 or Netgear WGPS606 wireless print servers? Or with these print servers and OS X?

6 comments:

  1. Anonymous9:51 pm

    Not sure how relevant this is to Mac OS X, but I've just got the ML-1610 working with WGPS606 for a Windows XP Home SP2 network. I didn't install the status monitor.

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  2. Ah, no that'd do it. Thanks for that...

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  3. Anonymous7:46 pm

    I added these drivers myself and there is still no option for it in the printer utility... any chance you could give brief summery of how to fully install it or am i just an idiot and it should just be there?

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  4. Anonymous7:48 pm

    yep i'm just an idiot.. sorry :)

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  5. i downloaded splix but didn't work...

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