Some USB printers actually ship with Mac OS X drivers. However, most of those drivers only work with the printer being connected directly to one of the Mac's USB ports. Once you made the USB printer available on your local network, through an USB print server for instance, a Mac is not capable of using that printer anymore.
Since I still have two Windows PCs at my house, which I wanted to be able to print from without the need to have the Mac running all the time, I added the small but sufficient Buffalo Print Server (
Buffalo LPV2-USB-TX1) into my LAN.
Setting up the Windows PC to use the printer, a
Samsung ML-1750, was a snap but Samsung's print driver for the Mac would work with neither Rendezvous nor IP-Printing.
Linux Prining to the Rescue
Fortunately, there is
linuxprinting.org. Installing their open-source PostScript Interpreter and Samsung-GDI printer drivers, added support for 12 Samsung printers to Mac OS X 10.3.4. While the
ML-1750 is not specifically listed, so far the ML-4500 and ML-6040 driver work just fine.
It is certainly a good start, seeing printer vendors adding OS X support, however, Mac users may still feel like 2nd class citizens on the local area network - even if
AppleTalk is spoken there.
