Low Resolution with OEM Drivers with HP M553 LaserJet

[zt8242]

I work with Affinity Designer on a Mac and printing using AirPrint produces high resolution crisp prints. However, using the OEM HP drivers produce pixelated graphics with jagged lines.

I would really like to use the OEM drivers as they allow the use of different color profiles and many more media types.

Is this a settings issue or simply incompatibility with macOS?

[John_Getzke]

If you are trying to print high resolution images with a laserjet then your expectations might exceed the physical specifications of the printer.  

Laserjets have limited resolution options.  Inkjets are typically a better choice when high definition design or art prints are required.  Inkjets have much more flexibility on resolution than laserjets do.

Shoot us some specifications on what you are trying to print in terms of DPI.  We can check the specs of the printer to tell you if what you want is possible or not.

Or you could try to export your job to a different PC, load the drivers and try to print from that machine to compare.  That would confirm any OS specific limitations.  However, i doubt the OS specific drivers are the problem in your situation.  There is only so much a laserjet can do.

[zt8242]

Thank you for the reply.

No, I do not expect this laser printer to produce the same quality as an inkjet.

However, I do want it to print at the highest resolution possible. At the moment only the AirPrint driver can achieve this. The only way to get the same crispness as the AirPrint driver is to export as a TIFF file. For some reason the OEM driver can print TIFF files at the same quality as the AirPrint driver.

[John_Getzke]

If you were on a Windows machine then I would have suggested trying one of the UPDs to see if they behave better with your application.

In your case you could try a few printer drivers from alternative models and see if one works better than another.  My goto driver for legacy applications is the laserjet 4000 but you may be able to choose something around the laserjet 500 family for this one.  Spot check a few alternative drivers and see if you can find one that performs better than the current model specific driver.

After swapping the drivers I'm not sure there is anything else left to try.  You can try contacting HP under your warranty and see if they can confirm a bug with the current model specific driver.  If so then you would have to wait for a driver update to publish before you can resolve the issue.  Maybe they have one in development that they could share with you.  

There are settings in the printer properties area (Windows) that impact the resolution but I am not sure if those same features are available on the Mac version of the driver.

Here is something for an Epson printer that describes the resolution setting:

https://files.support.epson.com/docid/cpd5/cpd52925/source/spcs/source/printers/source/printing_soft...

https://files.support.epson.com/htmldocs/tx235_/tx235_la120ug/source/printers/source/printing_softwa...

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/2332062

[Repairatrooper]

We have clients that use this combo with no issue. Sounds like a driver issue or settings. Make sure resolution settings are correct and also make sure your firmware is up to date.  There were some MAC specific updates a couple of revisions ago.

[zt8242]

I have tried PrintFab drivers and they work fine. Unfortunately page alignment is off for custom page sizes.

So it really is a driver issue. And neither of the 3 drivers is perfect. But AirPrint is the closest minus the color profiling.

Maybe I'll get around to trying some of the older drivers you mentioned.

[zt8242]

Firmware is the latest and resolution set to imageRET3600.