While HP launched a technical study of how to fix network printer shortcomings on the HP 3000, customers reported more problems getting the latest printers to do Page Level Recovery (PLR).

LPQ1000s which replaced aging 2564 printers at Great Falls School District haven’t been able to match up to the functionality the older printers delivered, according to Bob McGregor of the school district. “I went to hang them off the DTC, and the PLR doesn’t work there, either,” McGregor said. Print jams on payroll check runs cause problems that only the ESPUL network print solution from RAC Consulting resolves for the site. HP’s bundled network printing software isn’t the only failure point for PLR on the LPQ printers, according to McGregor. HP dropped maintenance on the 256x line of printers and advised 3000 shops to go with the LPQ devices — which aren’t supporting PLR in serial connections, either.

“This is the migration path they gave us, and they don’t do what our older printers did for us,” McGregor said. HP gave the site a Service Request number on the problem, SR 503466383. He noted that the common fix being reported to customers — using Revision Level C of the LPQ firmware — doesn’t resolve the problem.

Another report gave bad marks to the C-level firmware. Chris Bartram of 3k Associates said that “after the firmware upgrade, the printer slowed down to probably one-eighth the speed of what it would do before the upgrade. We did some testing and discovered that the new firmware has serious problems with some escape-sequences, and that some of the reports we send to the printers use shift-in/shift-out sequences; each of which causes the printer to pause for several seconds.”

The lack of reliable page level recovery “is a nightmare on envelope printing, because you’re hardly printing anything anyway,” McGregor said. He called Printronix, makers of the LPQ Series, as part of his service request. “I think they’re the ones that need to fix the printer,” he said. “It has such a big buffer that you’d think it could control itself in its own buffer, once the HP 3000 passes it.”