Monthly Archives: August 2009

New Printer: Samsung ML-2851

22 Saturday Aug 2009

Posted by in Computers, mac, osx

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We bought a laser printer, a Samsung ML-2851. It connects to our LAN via an ethernet cable, so it’s available to all our computers. Well, after a major hassle that is. You see, the printer did not ship with the OS X software needed to configure it. I knew I wanted it to have a fixed IP address, I knew what that was by the port on my router. It did ship with a Mac friendly postscript print driver. It has a nice web based set up utility – but we could not get to that until we were able to configure its tcp/ip settings. After quite a bit of frustration it occurred to me to check out the windows programs on the printer CD. We have a windows based netbook, and we found an IP configuration program on it. WHY IS THERE NO OS X IP CONFIGURATION PROGRAM WITH A DEVICE THAT CLAIMS OS X COMPATIBILITY?? The printer test page, generated by holding down the power button for a few seconds, contained the mac address. Once we found this program, the rest was not too bad. Beware that configuring the tcp/ip parameters is not a trivial task, and it required a corresponding change to my router configuration. Not plug and play.

Initial opinion: We like the printer. Print quality is good, it prints duplex (both sides of paper), it’s quiet after an initial warm up. Mac support is seriously deficient.