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http://www.macnn.com/articles/01/10/27/nec:.no/

NEC: no OS X drivers for Superscript 1400

updated 10:15 pm EDT, Sat October 27, 2001

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Christopher Owens forwarded a response from NEC Tech Support to his inquiry about OS X drivers for the company's Superscript 1400 printer, saying that the1400 has "hardware limitations that prevent it from functioning in a Unix based environment."

"I don't know if this will affect the 1450N or higher printers that will support PostScript, but sharing similar architecture, I don't know how lucky we'll be. The drivers that ship with the printer appear to still function with OS 9, however."

by MacNN Staff

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10/27, 10:50pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
Sounds Bogus

They must be really crappy engineers indeed if they managed to build something that can't function just because the OS is unix-based instead of Mac based. If they can build drivers for Windows, they can build drivers for Mac OS X. After all, my Dad's crappy dot-matrix printer from 1990 still works perfectly using the USB-Parallel bridge. Building drivers for a newer printer should be easy in comarison to that.

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10/27, 11:04pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
Is this a joke?

I'm no programmer but I have serious doubts that they the printer can't work with OS X because it's based on UNIX. Sounds like they're either ignorant or just lazy. My bet is on lazy.

majinbutz

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10/27, 11:25pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
NEC blows

I would have thought that Mac users were too smart to buy anything from company as absolutely crappy as NEC.

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10/28, 12:14am | report spam | close Reply | delete
Far from crappy...

I wouldn't go so far as to say that NEC makes crappy products. They make some of the finest computer equipment (peripherals) in the business. Look at the Multisync monitors that lead the industry for years.

NEC printers have great bang for the buck. The 1400 is less than US$300 and spits out 12 pages a minute at 1200dpi. That's a pretty good deal, if you ask me. And as the poster of the information in this article, I can tell you that it has been absolutely trouble-free.

I don't think you can find a laser printer for that kind of money anywhere that will work well in a cross-platform environment at that speed and resolution. The only printers supported on OSX out of the box are expensive HP, Lexmark, Apple, Tektronix, and a few other printers. It's just too bad that they're claiming "hardware problems" as the basis for their printers not working.

Best regards,
Chris

i-sob
Fresh-Faced Recruit

Joined: Sep 2001

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10/28, 12:20am | report spam | close Reply |
Off topic..

I haven't bought any NEC products in years, but they made my first CD-ROM drive years ago and I have an old NEC 17" MultiSync moniter that has performed flawlessly for a long time and is still in use.
Does NEC actually make poor quality products (now?) or were you just being obnoxious?
Anyway, the "UNIX enviroment" is total bunk. There's no such thing as a uniform "UNIX" printing enviroment -- and if there were, Mac OS X wouldn't have it.

i-sob
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Joined: Sep 2001

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10/28, 12:34am | report spam | close Reply |
Off topic..

I haven't bought any NEC products in years, but they made my first CD-ROM drive years ago and I have an old NEC 17" MultiSync moniter that has performed flawlessly for a long time and is still in use.
Does NEC actually make poor quality products (now?) or were you just being obnoxious?
Anyway, the "UNIX enviroment" is total bunk. There's no such thing as a uniform "UNIX" printing enviroment -- and if there were, Mac OS X wouldn't have it.

Joined:

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10/28, 12:37am | report spam | close Reply | delete
Printers

The reason more printers don't work on OS X is simply because there are no drivers for them - it has nothing to do with the hardware being fundamentally incompatible with Unix. If you take NEC at their word, they must suck. If they don't suck, then they are lying - which sucks still. Besides, I can use an HP with Windows, Mac OS 9, Mac OS X, Linux, and Solaris. If that isn't cross-platform, what is? Expensive, yes. But it can be done.

ecampbel

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10/28, 02:04am | report spam | close Reply | delete
1400N (Network) is Fine

Network versions of printers if they include built in PostScript work fine with Mac OS X without any special drivers, which means the 1400N will work fine for your office.

Also, as other posters have said, the developers working for NEC are either incompetent or lying. Nothing about OS X, including its UNIX heritage, precludes it from working with any printer. It simply takes NEC to devote the resources towards developing drivers to work with the new printer architecture present in Mac OS X.

ecampbel

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10/28, 02:09am | report spam | close Reply | delete
Work Around

To print to printers that only have Mac OS 9 drivers, you can utilize Mac OS X's ability to print to PDF's. Inside your OS X application, use the Print command to create a PDF file, and then fire up Acrobat inside of OS 9 to print the file. Lame, but it works.

ehintz
Fresh-Faced Recruit

Joined: May 2001

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10/28, 02:42am | report spam | close Reply |
Sounds like

A load of bullshit if you ask me... I wonder what support or marketroid is about to lose their job over this PR fumble?

vmarks
Moderator

Joined: Apr 2001

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10/28, 09:09am | report spam | close Reply |
How to make it work

First of all, the 1450N and higher that are PostScript capable should work.

Second of all, the easiest way to make this work is, get a cheap old PC. Your neighbors have one from when they last upgraded to a Dell. Put Linux on it. Set up the Nec 1400 Printer on Linux, through CUPS (common unix printer system) or GhostScript.

Then, back in OS X, add the printer as an LPR printer at a network IP (the IP of the linux computer.) You will be able to print to the Nec now, and can share it with other Macs, or Windows machines, yes, you've just made a print server. Annoying, but there are ways around everything.

lv marks @ mac. com

jparisi
Dedicated MacNNer

Joined: Jun 2001

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10/28, 09:52am | report spam | close Reply |
NEC

I use a SuperScript 1800N Flawlessly - However - the free printer that I recieved with my iBook (Lexmark 32) from apple doesnt work in X :(

oranjdisc
Senior User

Joined: Jun 2001

0

10/28, 10:28am | report spam | close Reply |
Another angle...

It seems rather shortsighted for them to not create OSX drivers, for if I was in the market for a new peripheral of some type, whether it's a printer, monitor, whatever, I would stay away from the NEC brand simply because of this debacle. It goes beyond drivers for one printer it speaks to the company's support of the Mac in general.

flysky
Junior Member

Joined: Feb 2001

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10/28, 12:58pm | report spam | close Reply |
I got the same response

I got the same message a few weeks ago when I inquired about the time table for the availability of OS X compatible drivers:

"The 1400 will not be supported in Mac OS X. It has hardware limitations that prevent it from working in a UNIX based operating system."

When I asked for elaboration, I received this message:

"The 1400 is not a PCL or a Postscript printer. It uses 14 bitmap fonts and is not upgradeable. Those are the hardware limitations."

I posted about this on the message boards here and at other sites to find out whether someone could verify the validity of the NEC tech's assertions, but I received no reply. I plan to buy a new printer from a company actually committed to the Mac platform.

Luis Sanchez
Fresh-Faced Recruit

Joined: Apr 2000

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10/28, 01:46pm | report spam | close Reply |
Printer has no brain

I remember NEC releasing 'Win Printers' which basically had little to no processing power and relied on the host computer to completely process the data before submitting it to the printer. Hence the printer was not PCL or Postscript compatible, even though the drivers made you believe it was a PCL printer (it was, but in software).
The 1400 might be such a printer. This means that they would have alot more work to do than a typicle driver for bringing it over to OSX, even if they did have OS 9 drivers.
If it was a truly a PCL or postscipt printer, OS X's built in support for these kinds of printers would has made providing a driver a relative snap. If they need to port some PCL-to-NEC proprietary protocol software, they might not see the value (to them) in spending the time and money needed to do that.

John Franklin

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10/28, 04:14pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
1450N is Okay

I have a 1450N, and it has been able to print from 10.0.x and 10.1. (The 1450N has PostScript 3 and AppleTalk support built in.) The one caveat is that when using LPR in Mac OS X, you must specify a port, unlike Mac OS 9, which can detect the right port automatically. (The magic port name is "PORT1".) I am not sure if 10.1 has this limitation, because I haven't set up a 10.1 machine to print to that printer from scratch without entering the port name yet.

As with any PostScript printer, you can print from Mac OS X to the 1450N without adding extra software, but the control improves slightly (you can choose the DPI, since the 1400 series handle 300, 600, and 1200) if you have the right PPD available. I'm not entirely sure where the PPD is supposed to go, since putting it /Library/Printers/PPDs/ didn't make it show up in the default list, but putting it in any accessible place will work, since Mac OS X lets you select any file when choosing a PPD.

One last note; the support pages for the 1400 at http://support.nectech.com/ seem to indicate that the 1400 does indeed use some sort of software-based page description stuff, so NEC's engineers are being lazy, it is true, by not writing a Mac OS X driver, but since that product has apparently been discontinued anyway (they announced they were getting out of printers a while ago) it's hardly surprising.

abrody
Junior Member

Joined: Mar 1999

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10/28, 05:16pm | report spam | close Reply |
NEC used to be

One of only four vendors making monitors for the Mac, Viewsonic, Sony, Radius being the others. Now they make the lame excuse they can't support the printer structure. Already, Brother, a company that has little Mac support has drivers updated three times for its printers to support Mac OS X. And they are working on getting support for about 20 of their Laser printers on Mac OS X. Check http://www.index-site.com/printersx.html and you'll see what I mean. NEC by the way is Nippon Electric, one of the primary electricity suppliers in Japan. And being that Japan is more heavily into purchasing Macs than the U.S., you'd wonder how could NEC be blindsided by their potential market. Oh well, next time I purchase an NEC product, I'll be sure to send a letter to their products manager.

\0

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10/29, 05:28pm | report spam | close Reply | delete
it's the money...

�
As far as I can tell Nec has never supported Macs with enthusiasm or the necessary resources.

After I got my $1400 NEC/Mitsubishi professional quality monitor I discovered that the advertised whiz-bang USB control features didn't work on Macs. No problem they said, we're working on it. Maybe they did, but there were never any results -- after a year of nagging they finally confessed that the Mac USB software for my monitor would never be finished. They offered no compensation either.

OTOH, I needed a replacement when my monitor started acting up and they processed the exchange instantly (unlike Apple, who once made me wait 2 months for a replacement monitor).

In the future I will ask the hard questions and get a written response before spending that much money with any company.
�

BobbyG
Fresh-Faced Recruit

Joined: Sep 1999

0

10/29, 10:38pm | report spam | close Reply |
NEC blows chunky-chunks

In case you didn't catch my drift... A-men to all the above comments. I bot a 1450N for my school principal. The thing does work just ducky except that she hasn't been able to use it for the last two months since WE CAN'T FIND A BLOODY TONER CART for the muthaf'n machine. And to boot, the Admin utility (for renaming, setting IP, etc.) is Win only--not a deal-breaker since we got a couple of them--but the utility can't SEE this machine on the LAN. Thank god the principal's iMac can, or my butt is kicked.

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NEC: no OS X drivers for Superscript 1400

updated 10:15 pm EDT, Sat October 27, 2001

Sounds Bogus

Is this a joke?

NEC blows

Far from crappy...

Off topic..

Off topic..

Printers

1400N (Network) is Fine

Work Around

Sounds like

How to make it work

NEC

Another angle...

I got the same response

Printer has no brain

1450N is Okay

NEC used to be

it's the money...

NEC blows chunky-chunks

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NEC: no OS X drivers for Superscript 1400

updated 10:15 pm EDT, Sat October 27, 2001

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Sounds Bogus

Is this a joke?

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Off topic..

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1400N (Network) is Fine

Work Around

Sounds like

How to make it work

NEC

Another angle...

I got the same response

Printer has no brain

1450N is Okay

NEC used to be

it's the money...

NEC blows chunky-chunks

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