HP LaserJet 4050n PCL XL error windows 10

[virtualgm]

HP LaserJet 4050n Windows 10 using USB port cable shows a PCL XL error Subsystem: KERNEL Error: UnsupportedProtocol Operator: 0x0 Position: 0.  Installed UPD 6.4.1.22169 driver. Still no go.

[dansdaduk]

I don't know the answer, but it may be that the PCL XL print job generated by your driver is using a Class/Revision level of this Page Description Language which is not supported on this (relatively old) device.

Most modern Laserjet printers probably (?) support C/R 3.0 of the protocol, but perhaps the LJ 4050 only supports C/R 2.0 - I don't know, and it's not easy to find out.

... and perhaps there is some configuration setting somewhere to tell the UPD driver which C/R to generate - I would have thought that this would be in one of the .gpd files perhaps.

Of course, none of the above helps you to get the printer going, but it may be the explanation.

Just to try to confirm (or not) that this may be the cause, print a small test file, but select the 'print to file'  option in the Print dialogue.

Examine the resultant .prn file - you shoud be able to open it with NotePad, and although a lot of the file will appear as 'gobbledy-**bleep**', you should be able to find the PCL XL header and find out which Class and Revision levels are specified by the print job.

The following is an example of a NotePad view of a 'captured' UPD job for a different printer (a LJ 1320n), but it does demonstrate what you should look for:

In this example, the two fields following "HP-PCL XL;" show that the Class = 2 and Revision level = 0. 

[davidzuts · Accepted solution]

This is a very old printer and has difficulty with pcl 6. I would advice trying the postscript driver which usually works better. PCL XL errors only occur when using the pcl 6 driver.

[dansdaduk]

Whilst not disagreeing with @davidzuts comments, note that:

My Windows 10 Professional 64-bit system has several built-in (non-UPD, device-specific) drivers for LaserJet 4050 printers:

 

I have no idea whether or not the same drivers are built-in to the 32-bit edition of Windows 10.

You may have to click the Windows Update button in this Add Printer dialogue, then wait (perhaps for several minutes) whilst additional drivers are downloaded, before the list is repopulated.

Of course, I have no idea if these drivers will work successfully, or if they will provide all of the features that you may want. 

I've set up a dummy printer using the PCL6 variant, and can confirm that the print job generated is for PCL XL Class/Revision 2.0., although (with no access to a real printer of this model) I've no idea if the driver generates jobs which your device can handle.

Note also that one of the above device-specific drivers is a  PCL5 one - from Windows 10 onwards, the UPD is only available in PCL6 (PCL XL) and PostScript variants - the PCL5 variant of the UPD is not supported .

[Imagenet_Tech]

Hello, if there is a built-in PCL5 driver I would definitely go with that driver, more stable than PCL6 and Postscript is slower. Usually when I get PCL XL errors I just switch to PCL 5 and the issue is resolved.

Hope this helps....

[virtualgm]

I tried all the solutions provided here and the only one that solved the problem was installing the PS driver and using it instead of any version of PCL.

My Win10 Home version doesn't have the 4050N PCL driver so I imagine that only Win10 Pro has it as was posted here. BTW, the original driver CD that came with this printer brand new were for the 4550, at any rate and they must have shared drivers. That didn't work either.

It's fixed though with the PS driver! Thanks.