Restoring Scanner Support for the HP 3052 LaserJet AIO Printer

I'm a bit late to the party on this, but ever since Snow Leopard came out, I've been searching for a way to preserve my HP 3052 printer, and in particular, it's scan functionality. I had given up hope, and had actually bought another printer (big mistake, but that's another story...), when I finally stumbled across an old thread in these forums that provided the solution. A post by Marty M. on August 31, 2009 in the thread in this forum titled, "Restore scanning functionality to HP Laser AiO?" described a way to reinstall the OS X 10.5 (Leopard) HP 3052 drivers in Snow Leopard, which would restore the ability to use the HP Director software to perform scanning. Reprinted here are Marty's instructions:

Marty M: Here is what I did to get scan functionality working again with my network attached HP LaserJet 3055 AiO:

1. Uninstall the old HP software (Applications... HP LaserJet Software... HP Uninstaller)
2. Remove all printers and queues from the System Preferences... Print & Fax
3. Reset the printing system System Preferences... Print & Fax... (right-click in the empty printer box at the left).
4. Download the latest 10.5 driver (8.2 HP LaserJet 3050/3052/3055/3390/3392 Release for Mac OSX 10.5) from www.hp.com
5. Run the HP AiO installer in the downloaded driver package
6. (Ignore the .kext errors and warnings)
7. Allow to reboot when installation completes
8. HP Installer will run- add printer by IP address
9. Print a test page
10. Scan a test page (Applications... HP LaserJet... Scan... HP Scan)
11. Run Software Update- Install updated HP drivers.

I followed Marty's instructions, and am VERY happy to report that my 3052's scan functionality one again works! Hallelujah! A thousand thank-you's to Marty for discovering this and sharing it with the rest of us whose HP AIO's had become expensive paperweights in the wake of the upgrade to Snow Leopard. 😉 As Marty points out, printing uses Snow Leopard's built-in driver for the 3052, but HP's drivers are used for scanning. You cannot scan directly from Preview or Image Capture (the 3052 is not recognized as an attached scan device), but this is only a minor caveat.