Xerox Phaser 3115 with Mac OS X

Well with our main printer out of action for a while, I had a Xerox Phaser 3115 on temporary loan. However, turns out it was really a software printer, which makes printing from a non-Windows computer a little more painful than usual. Otherwise you could just use one of the many freely available filters that are usually available.

Being a software printers means that functions that are normally performed by the printers firmware are instead performed by software on the host computer (using a little more CPU power from the user's computer). All is done to cut down on manufacturing costs, though in actual fact the end-user doesn't save a lot of money because it is possible to buy proper printers with its own real GDI engine (or what not) for much the same price. So if you're out buying a printer or any hardware for that matter, it's worth doing a little bit of research and getting one that is slightly better better in thise sense. Even if it costs a tiny bit more it's usually worth getting something that doesn't take a major shortcut like this.

The good news, however, is that you can actually still use this printer on your Mac and Linux as well. Although Xerox say they don't support anything other than Windows (their support people will even tell that you're out of luck), they didn't actually make this printer themselves. In actual fact the Phaser 3115 is a rebadged Samsung ML-1710 (Thanks to gsmith on the AppleTalk forums for pointing this out). Samsung do make Mac and Linux drivers available for this model. So I managed to get it working fine with my mac using these drivers.

The driver can be downloaded from Samsung.