Zebra LP 2844-Z Blurry Prints from OSX, Windows Prints Fine

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Zebra LP 2844-Z Blurry Prints from OSX, Windows Prints Fine

I've been trying to get my LP 2844-Z shipping label printer (Z means that it uses the ZPL language) to work with two machines, one with Snow Leopard, and one with Mountain Lion. I set up the printer using the built in ZPL driver that is included in OSX 10.6.6 and higher. I am able to print a test page from CUPS at "localhost:631/" and the CUPS test page prints crystal clear text but the CUPS test image is a bit blurry. Whenever I try to print something from Mac OSX, I get very blurry images printed. If just printing black text, text usually shows up as more of a speckled gray.

I've tried a few other versions of the zebra.ppd driver that I found online on some ubuntu forums and all have given me the same result.

I've gone into CUPS and made sure that the paper/media size are the correct 4x6 inches.

I've made sure that the paper size is correctly set to 4x6 inch within OSX and I've even tried scaling images to the exact 203 dpi resolution and 4x6 inch size that the printer uses, but I always get the same blurry printing result.

I've tried printing identical images from Windows and it prints perfectly with both text and images. I also tried making a 4x6 native text only document in word and just printing that out in mac, and the image is faint and speckled with just text. On windows, the same test prints perfectly clear solid black letters as it should.

Below are scans of what the ouput looks like of the CUPS test page printed from OSX and an identical native 4x6 Word document printed on mac and on windows. As you can see from the CUPS Test Page, the image is not very clear, but the text is.

The windows test is there to show that the printer is capable of producing crisp images and not just crisp plain text.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

Posted on Oct 22, 2012 9:55 AM

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Answer 1

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DriverWizard

Level 1

8 points

Jan 9, 2017 12:48 AM in response to aramkolt

There is a solution to this problem but you need to pay for a commercial driver, which images the data in the same way as the PC drivers do. The commercial driver supports hundreds of thermal label printers including the LP2844Z, it is also a lot faster at processing the pages and can achieve 3" of labels at full speed in this printer which means your shipping labels come out fast.

Details on the product are here.

https://www.peninsula-group.com/mac-thermal-printer-driver/

Hope this helps.

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Answer 2

aramkolt Author

Level 1

8 points

Oct 22, 2012 3:31 PM in response to aramkolt

Well, I figured out why text sometimes prints clearly (for example in the test page printout) in Mac and other times not. The printer only has basic fonts on it, so when something like Helvetica is used, it does print clearly, but again this is only for text and only supported fonts (other fonts print blurry). The test text printouts I was doing on both windows and mac were not using the built in fonts of the printer. Windows was able to handle it anyway without a problem because windows apparently just sends prints over as RAW data (or some other type of non-text data) and creates a pixel-perfect image since it controls each pixel from the computer's software side and not the printer's (or at least that's my reasoning anyway).

My goal is still to figure out how to print clear images like windows does by default, that way, it should be font-independent and able to print anything at 203dpi.

I'm not really sure how I'd go about forcing this conversion to happen each time in Mac. Should be doable though.

Any suggestions on how to improve image quality?

Thanks in advance!

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