Samsung xpress M2835DW duplex printing - Automatic Two-Sided Duplex Accessory not persistent

[Mari0H]

I'm using a Samsung M2835DW b/w laser printer with macOS 10.15 Catalina. I'm using the Samsung Universal Print and Scan Driver V3.91.00 (This is the most current driver of the HP Universal Print and Scan Driver(UPD) for MacOS for Samsung printers as of today).

This printer driver allows to print reliable but there is still one issue left: The printer has a Automatic Two-Sided Duplex unit. On the Mac I go to System => Printer & Scanner and choose the Samsung 283x Series printer. In the "Options and Toner" => Options I tick the checkbox for the duplex unit and then my printer prints double sided as expected.

The problem is the next time I'm going to print I cannot choose to print double sided in the print dialogue (the checkbox is not offered). The reason is, that the tick in the System => Printer and Scanner specifications gets lost after every successful double sided print.

Is there something I can do to make the Automatic Two-Sided Duplex unit permanent or is there a problem with the printer driver?

[Under_Siege]

It's something specific to the 3.91 driver. I have been trying to figure this out for a while, and I've been blaming Apple for it — even going so far as to open a support ticket with their engineers about it.

I've got a Samsung M2880FW and for an experiment, I created a High Sierra VM in VirtualBox and installed the Catalina (3.91) driver there. It gave the same results (duplex printing gone after first print). I uninstalled it (using the uninstaller) and installed the older driver (1.03) and it still gave those same results.

It turns out that the 3.91 uninstaller doesn't actually uninstall the driver. So I manually deleted the files in /Library/Printers/Samsung, then installed the 1.03 driver and presto! — the printer works as expected with the duplex setting remaining.

It's clear to me that the issue is in the printer driver. I hope HP will fix it soon.

[Mari0H]

Under_Siege thank you for your helpful comment and sharing your solution. It is helpful to know now that the printer driver is to blame and not the operating system. You were able to circumvent the issue getting the older version 1.03 of the driver installed.

But I'm wondering if your circumvention would work for me too. I'm running MacOS 10.15 Catalina which now requires fully 64-bit software. And this was the reason why the older Samsung / HP printer driver did not work anymore on my iMac. Since also Airprint does not work well for me I had to wait for many months until the new 3.91 printer driver was available.

You confirmed with your experiments that something is wrong with the 3.91 printer driver. This was my assumption before. And in-between I run a second printer on my system (Brother MFC-L3750 CDW) which comes with its on printer driver, which is able to offer the duplex print option permanent.

The next step would be to open a ticket with HP which is responsible to provide the fixes for the 3.91 printer driver. I tried this before but was not successful. Most likely to fix this error is no rocket science but the developers have to know about it before. Could somebody here in the forum point me to a working way to open a electronic ticket with a HP printer which I cannot register with HP?

[Under_Siege]

The 1.03 driver is a 32-bit driver that will work on any OS lower than Catalina (the VM I used to test was High Sierra). Because I'm on Catalina now, I have to use the 64-bit driver found in version 3.91 which, as we've noticed, does not work completely. As of now, we're stuck using this version and re-opening the printer properties to re-enable duplex *every time*.

I don't know how to open a ticket with HP, but I'll try. Please do the same.