Business Inkjet 1200d with Snow Leopard?

[Wilsonlaidlaw]

I have been looking at just this problem. I am afraid the cheapest and maybe the easiest solution is still HP with the Officejet 8000, which I can buy in France for about €140. However, since we shut down for the winter in about 3 to 4 weeks, I am not going to buy any printers at this time only for the inks to gum up over the winter. I can manage by using the Ghostprint system on the 1200's for the time being (you have to install all three bits of software in the right order to get it to work). I bought a couple of nearly new Xerox Phaser 8400's late last year in the UK for about £100 pounds each. Sadly neither had the duplex unit which is why I got them cheaply. I think the going rate for a used duplex 8400DN is about £200. Only downside is high electricity consumption and quite a lot of heat soak. There are quite a few options if you are prepared to have "all in ones" but I don't want that.

Wilson 

[William_G]

When I attempt a custom install of the HP drivers from the 10.5 disc, the HP drivers are grayed out and not available. I'm not willing to give up my printer (Biz Inkjet 1200dtwn), so I'm moving backward from Snow Leopard to Leopard. ... Unless there might be another way to get the driver for Snow Leopard. Any ideas?

[owroff]

Although this problem is marked as solved by using the driver off 10.5 you can also use this driver and the only thing it won't use the duplexer but it will print just fine.  This is on HP's website here:  http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=18...

You may have to copy and paste to get to it if it doesn't show up as a hyperlink.

[Wilsonlaidlaw]

I tried that HP driver and it did not work well for me. Quite a few others have had that problem. It may depend on whether you are running Slow Leopard in 32 or 64 bit mode or a mixed network. My 1200D is connected USB to my older Intel iMac, which runs in 32 bit. The other Macs on the network are new machines and are running in 64 bit mode. The 1200 would print direct from the iMac but would not print in shared Bonjour mode from the other machines. Ghostprint works from all but the print quality is not as good as the 10.5 HP driver and the absence of duplexing is a big downside for me, as I print a lot of multi-page manuals. I will finish my current load of carts and then get an Officejet 8000.

Wilson

[owroff]

The driver I indicated in my last post does work on the new iMac with a quad core i7 processor.  I don't know about any of the older iMacs but the site says it will work with Intel based Macintoshes from 10.4 up.  The duplexer does work and I indicated that it didn't.  Only one thing in the options was marked as not usable but I never used it so I didn't even think to write it down.  I am running Snow Leopard 10.6.2 and that may make a difference.

[Wilsonlaidlaw]

The direct printing with the 10.5 driver worked fine. It was Bonjour shared printing that did not work. I too am using 10.6.2 on all SL machines. I wish I was using 10.6.3 in the hope that it will cure the 10810 finder crash/error when accessing external FW400 drives.

Wilson

[Snow_Leopard_10]

My HP Business Inkjet 1200 works excellent with Mac OS X 10.6.2 on an 27" iMac with Intel i7-processor at 2.8 GHz. Color and duplexer works fine, also!

Thanks a lot to owroff (posting of 03-05-2010) who find the right driver 3.3 at the HP website:

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareDescription.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodTypeId=18...

:-)

[owroff]

And sadly if you update to 10.6.3 this driver no longer works and won't install but give you an error message.  This is Apple's fault now.  Anybody have that problem and know how to fix it?

[owroff]

As per my last post in case anybody is still looking.  The 3.3.3 driver from HP will work on Snow Leopard through 10.6.4 and all but one function won't work and I believe it is the function that lets you see your ink supplies etc.  What it won't do is work as a networked printer.  It has to be plugged into a USB port on you Macintosh.  It will however work if you are also running any version of Windows for XP Pro through 7 using either Parallels 5.xxxx or VMWare Fusion 3.xxxx.  Of the two I started out using VMWare Fusion only to find it chunky and slow but the printer worked better with it than Parallels.  Both require you download the driver for Windows if you want all the functions to work including ink supplies etc.  It is a little awkward using it with Parallels but worth the trouble as Parallels is much faster and more responsive than VMWare Fusion.  And no I don't work for either one of them.  I have XP Pro on Parallels and the printer works just fine as noted.

[Wilsonlaidlaw]

Does even Duplex printing work? That was what did not work using the Footmatic/Ghostprint Linux driver set up and lead me to buy a HP Office Inkjet 8000 pro. I print quite a lot of booklets and just have to have auto duplex. I will be selling my 1200D on eBay and it would be nice to tell folks that it will work on 10.6.4 with only the ink level issue. You can always print out this direct from the printer.

Wilson