Welcome to HP printers. As you know, HP generally provides two drives for their larger printers - the PS and the PCL. There are significant differences between the two drivers. The PS driver came directly from adobe while HP wrote the PCL driver. The PCL driver was designed to work with drafting programs (AutoCAD) while the PS driver is better with drawing programs (Photoshop, illustrator, etc). The PS driver will generally give better colors than the PCL driver. You will find that the 8500 series drivers have terrible greens (to much blue). Go into the CD that contains the drivers and you will find a file that contains tweaked Pantone colors for the PCL. You can use these to get better color output, but the colors will go weird if you send the file to someone else. The best thing to do for colors is to create your own color profile (use and X-rite colorphotometer) or have a firm like "the digital dog" (at www.digitaldog.net) create one for you (cost of 100.00). (they sent you a file, you print it out and send them the print out, and they send you an ICC profile for your printer).
The PCL driver does not automatically turn on all of the print menu/printer options. You must turn them on in the printer preferences screen on the computer as well as turn them on in the printer menu itself! This includes which trays (both input and output) that are active. This probably why the 11x17 works with the PS driver but not the PCL driver. You will also find that several of the options on the print menu screen only work with the PCL driver. With large plot files, the PCL driver can be incredibly slow. A plot file that takes 5 minutes with the PS driver can take 40 minutes with the PCL driver. However, the PS driver can occasionally plot phantom lines on the plots. This never happens with the PCL driver You can have both drivers set up on your machine. Keep the same printer node, but slightly change the printer name. I use simple names such as 8550PS and 8550PCL. this allows you to quickly switch from one to the other. Also, unless you are in a large corporate setting, do not use the HP Jet Administration software - go to the newer HP printer wizard. The printer wizard is much more stable, but it does not allow you to actively ping the printers to see if they are on the network. There are other differences between the drivers, but you will eventually find them out. s. figuers --------------------------------------------------------------------- List hosting provided by Directions Magazine | www.directionsmag.com | To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
