HP Photosmart C7280: Report and suggestions

[darkcoder]

Hi everyone!

 With this post I have the pleasure of reporting my positive user experience of connecting a brand new printer with the Amiga. I also ask for suggestions to solve a little problem described below.

 I have recently purchased an All-In-One HP Photosmart C7280 to use in my domestic LAN, composed by a PC, an iMac and 2 Amigas. The Amigas are: A1200/030/50 and A4000T/060/50, both with OS3.9 BB2. I connect the C7280 to the LAN router via ethernet port, so it has its own static IP on the LAN.

Before purchasing, I saw 2 potential problems in using almost any new printer with the Amiga:
1) using a network printer with Amiga
2) availability of working printer drivers

To adress 1), I used "Netprinter" device made by Guido Mersmann. This driver was recently released (march 2008) for OS 3.x and MorphOS. It has 2 connection protocol "direct" and LPR. Using the former, the driver is able to comunicate with the C7280, while the latter didn't work. I have 2 small problems:
 - sometimes launching NetprinterPrefs freezes the A1200, though never give any problem with the A4000T (may be something related to the PCMCIA ?);
 - the OS3.x version comes with PNG icons, which I have to replace since I don't use the patch for PNG icons.
I hope future releases of Netprinter device solve these problems.
I have also tried to use NetLpr device. This one didn't work, probaly because it relies on the LPR protocol and the HP does not like it.

For the printer driver problem (2) I tried with the OS 3.9 printer drivers. Several of the HP printers supported by OS 3.9, indeed recognize the HP PCL3 language. Such a language has been replaced by an improved version named PCL3-Gui.
PCL3-Gui is the language of the C7280 as well as of several other HP printers in the current product range. I was not sure (because Peter Hutchison told me so) whether PCL3-Gui was backward compatible or not with PCL3. It turned out that the answer is YES!! :banana: :banana:

I tried with drivers for DeskJet 1600C and DeskJet 970C. As printing software I used Wordworth 2, Wordworth 7 and AmigaWriter 2. In all cases it was possible to print, even in color. Unfortunately there is a defect: on the printed page, there is an extra upper margin of 1.9 cm (everthing is printed 1.9 cm below the right position) and also a tiny extra left margin (more or less 0.4 cm). I tried to play with Printer Prefs settings but was unable to remove this defect. Any suggestion?

I will soon try to print with the HP drivers for OS 3.1 made by Peter Hutchison. Unfortunately, I did not have Turboprint.

Hope this report is helpful to anyone who wants to connect a new printer to his Amiga.
Is this post worth a promotion to "Technoid" Rank ?? :-D :-D

[Hodgkinson]

Rough guess: I had similar problems with my 3C589D PCMCIA network card and the system freezing/being unreliable when using it in the early days. Turned out I needed to allocate some more memory with the stack command.

I assume you know about cardpatch/cardreset? ;-)

[darkcoder]

I guess you are referring to the problem of NetPrinter on the A1200, right?
(the problem of extra print margins occurs also on the A4000T).

I have installed cardpatch/cardreset, but I have few experience with PMCIA (I have it only since february). You are probably right. When exactly it is needed to allocate more stack? At startup before cardpatch/cardreset ? or before calling NetPrinterPrefs (or another offending program). Is increasing the stack size on the program icon equivalent?

Can changing the parameters of cardreset/cardpatch improve things? I currently use the defaults


edit: NOW I got my promotion to Technoid!  :banana:

[Hodgkinson]

> I guess you are referring to the problem of NetPrinter on the A1200, right?

Yup (Well, I assume that the A4000T doesn't suffer from the reset problem...What are you using to connect to the network with your A4000T anyway?)

If im not mistaken cardpatch/cardreset needs to be started straight after setpatch in the start-up sequence on the A1200 (I run both, not sure if this is necessary).

As for the stack size, although this was for a different program (SMBFS); I was experiencing instability until I was advised to "stack 40000" in the same CLI/script as SMBFS straight before loading it. Since I made the alterations to the script that I was using to load it (Makes connecting to shared drives a lot easier than typing in the whole address), everything’s worked without a hitch since then.

That's as far as my technical expertise goes, im afraid. I’m just guessing from *limited* experience.

[darkcoder]

I have Ariadne on the 4000T

So I will try with higher stakc size before calling NetprinterPrefs. Thanks for your suggestions!