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Samsung Withdraws All Mac Printer Drivers

Samsung Logo I used to like gadgets from Samsung’s electronics division. They have caught up to the times and been making really great stuff compared to the more expensive Japanese brands. But this recent incident makes me think twice about Samsung’s support for Macs.

When Samsung first came out with their low end printer line, the ML series, it supported almost everything under the sun — even Macintosh computers. But now that a lot of Mac people have embraced it, Samsung decided to stop support of its printers on Macs universally, in North America, that is, where the Macintosh market is still the largest.

After installing Tiger on Grace’s Mac, I forgot to install the printer driver for our old Samsung ML-1710. I started looking for its latest driver on Samsung’s support site. But to my disappointment, it offered drivers for almost everything else but the Mac. That’s odd; they used to have Mac drivers all over the place!

I decided to dig deeper into this issue and discovered that Samsung’s North American operations have pulled all support for Mac drivers. And the only place to get them is from Samsung’s Asian site. Luckily I have a copy of the driver that I downloaded a year ago, and apparently it’s still the “latest” driver to date.

This taught me a lesson: Never to buy Samsung again. Stick to HP, Canon, Brother and other brands who have long time support for Macs.

UPDATE 04.22.2007: Apparently Samsung had a change of heart and decided to make drivers of some old printers available again for Mac users. But for my good’ol ML-1710 on Mac OSX 10.4.9, it’s available here. For all other OSX versions, they can be found from Samsung’s driver download site here.

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    • This entry was posted on Monday, July 4th, 2005 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Geek Stuff, Mac + OSX, No Logo, Rant. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

    4 Responses to “Samsung Withdraws All Mac Printer Drivers”

    1. Casey Says:
      July 8th, 2005 at 6:59 pm

      I had to go to the Australian site to get support for my ML-1740. I didn’t buy the Samsung printer for my Mac, because I can’t use Stamps.com software with one, so at first it wasn’t a problem, but when I found on the Tiger Compatibility page where to get them, I grabbed em as fast as I could.

      Tiger Compatibility Page is located at http://www.macintouch.com/tigerreview/incompatibility.html

    2. "Admin" Shun Chu Says:
      July 8th, 2005 at 10:13 pm

      Thanks for posting. For completeness’ sake, here are the links I used to look for the driver. The latest version for Mac OSX is 2.5 (works both in Panther in Tiger).

      You won’t find the driver here

      But you can find it here and here.

    3. Hans Westerby Says:
      May 24th, 2009 at 8:42 am

      I have read this article with interest. This is because I for the last two days have tried to find (download) a Printer Driver for my ML-1710P connected to MacBook Pro operating under OS X 10.5.x ( System OS X 10.5.7 is installed on my MacBook Pro). I could not understand why it was so difficult to find said Printer Driver, but this article gives me a good answer.
      In Samsung`s Download Center I find Printer Drivers for the following OS:
      Wn 98/ME/2K/XP, Wn 95/987ME, Wn XP, Linux, Wn Vista/2008, Wn 2000/XP/2003/Vista 2008 and windows xp 64-bit Edition. But NO Printer Driver for OS X 10.5.x.
      Do I have to buy a new Laser Printer? From Samsung ? Which printer i similar to the ML-1710P? Will a new printer from Samsung work with OS X 10.5.x? I hope someone can give me some answers.
      Kind regards

      Hans Westerby with e-mail: hansw@me.com

    4. mac drivers Says:
      July 7th, 2009 at 1:33 pm

      I have a lot of MAC and PC drivers on my site – all free and downloadable.