Printing on Mac OS X for the Dell 1600n

Update: I’ve revised the steps for setting up the printer as Line Printer Daemon (i.e., you print directly to the IP address). It is much faster than AppleTalk. -Tai

It seems there is a Bonjour bug in Mac OS X that affects some people trying to print to a Dell Multifunction 1600n Printer. The Dell printer is identical to the Xerox PE 120 Multifunction printer.

My solution is as follows:

1. Download the OS X Print driver from the Xerox Site for the WorkCentre PE120/PE120i
2. Unpack and install Driver to your Mac
3. Open System Preferences > Networking
4. Select the networking channel (Airport or Ethernet)
5. Click the AppleTalk tab
6. Turn ON AppleTalk
7. Open the Printer Utililty. (You should see the the Dell 1600n in the Bonjour window. )
8. Click the IP Printer icon
9. Select Line Printer Daemon – LPD
10. Enter the IP Address of the printer (e.g., 192.168.1.103)
11. Print using the Xerox PE120 PS driver that was downloaded in step 1.

It’s odd, for some reason the Dell 1600n refuses to print via Bonjour. I have also read that if you set up the printer as an LPR with a generic postscript printer, it will work fine as well.

Scanning on the 1600n Printer in Mac OS X

You can use an open source perl script to do networking scanning on any OS that supports perl. Thanks to Jon Chambers for this. You can find the script and it’s instructions on his site.