Ricoh MFD's ... Which HP driver would be compatible?

[scoobysteve]

Hi All,

I've got a client who has a Ricoh MPC4500 and are having a printing issue where there are about 1000 pages of garbled text and symbols being printed out. I have tried PCL5, PCL6 and have put in a PS chip with PS drivers loaded.

I thought i had solved the problem by putting in the PS chip and using PS driver however after 2 or 3mths the problem has now reoccured.

to eliminate ricoh drivers, what would be the best suited HP driver to use for testing purposes. I've been told HP LJ4's but there are like 10 variants of the HP LJ4 drivers (eg i, s etc).

any help would be great. thanks.

Kind Regards,
Steve

[Rorschach]

I usually use either the HP LasetJet 5 driver for testing such as this. Just the number, no M, no N, no L, no anything else.

The LaserJet 4 driver should work as well.

Bear in mind, you'll only be able to test the print functionality of the MPF. You won't be able to do any finishing or the like.

You might want to try the RPCS driver, as well.

[scoobysteve]

thanks for pointer.... basic print testing is all i need as it seems that none of our drivers seem to work (even RPCS) which is very strange.

funny thing was they had a little HP LJ4200 with PS installed (standard component) and that handled their printing in the past without issue. But saying that, only the PCL driver for that printer was installed.

[unisys12]

Remember, isolation is the key to troubleshooting this stuff (or anything actually).

So, does this happen with everyone in the office? If so, then your dealing with a MFP issue and I would start looking a firmware reload, memory swap or controller issue. If not, then isolate which PC's are having the problem. In your case, it sounds like just one PC, so isolate which applications are being printed from at the time this problem occurs. If you cannot find any correlation between the issue and a single application or job, then I would suspect a corrected spool or memory on the PC. Also, keep in mind that the LJ4200's default print dpi is 1200 and ours are set to 600 dpi by default. If you do find that it's a particular job that is causing the problem, try bumping up the dpi in the driver before printing said job and see what happens. (just a though that last one)

You also have to keep in mind, that PCL is PCL. I don't care if it's a HP driver, Xerox driver or a Ricoh driver. If it's a PCL driver, they all use the same code to deliver the job to said device. Yes, changing to PS or RPCS is a logical first step when trying to isolate the problem on a giving PC.

Anyway, hope my ramblings help you out and I can't wait to hear what you find as the culprit to this problem.

[scoobysteve]

hi,

thanks for the input.

This problem has happened when printing from many different PCs.

i too can confirm that it is only one specific type of document that fails however, who is printing it, i'm not sure. The person reporting the problem happens to be sitting in front of the MFD but not the person printing the document. There is about 15 people who print to this machine but they all print directly to the MFD not via a share.

In past, the culprit i found was a specific Novell Groupwise email. saying this, all other Groupwise emails would print fine. I noticed that this specific email was generated via a web form as opposed to being generated from a Mail application.

Also, i also noticed that all attachments in this document (eg word, excel, publisher) would also give rubbish printing when opened up. I tried saving the attachment to hdd first as well and then opening them up, but it gave rubbish printing too.

Anyhow, thanks for the suggestions. i also thought that PCL was PCL no matter who the print driver manufacturer was.

[rthonpm]

Scoob,

This is a known firmware bug with this model. The buffer memory of the print function never completely empties and when it fills up all you get out is gibberish. Try updating all of the firmware levels up the the latest and greatest and your problem should go away.

[fausto1981]

Try Updating the Firmware or use the RPCS driver.