Xerox Phaser 3115 with Mac OS X

Well with our main HP Laserjet 4 printer out of action for a while, I was left to do my printing with my brother's Xerox Phaser 3115. Of course all he cared about when he bought it was that it works in Windows XP. In an ideal world this wouldn't be a problem because printers tend to be quite generic in protocol with a wide range of filters usually available.

However, it turns out he was ripped off and the printer is really a software printer. This means that functions that are normally performed by 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 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 not falling down this trap again if you can help it.

Though what if you do have a Xerox Phaser 3115 now and you're using a Mac or even Linux? Well Xerox doesn't support anything but Windows and their support people will even tell you that there are no drivers Fortunately, however, there are drivers. 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 in the end though personally I'm reluctant to use binary only software in Linux. I find it rather absurd that Xerox are so unhelpful with this matter. The least they could do when rebadging another product is make all the drivers available.

The driver can be downloaded from Samsung Support.