Printing

This page contains information on the household's printing solution.

HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M477fdw

Networking

The device is connected via Ethernet cable to the household network and is visible to all device, regardless of whether they are connected via WiFi or via Ethernet.

iOS

The device can be printed to via AirPrint.

macOS

The device is visible via Bonjour. Once added to the list of printers/scanners by an administrator, it can be used by all users on the system.

Black & white printing and double-sided printing "just works" - the macOS print dialog has two dedicated checkboxes for these options.

Windows

The device is automatically visible in the list of printers, possibly because of Bonjour, but I'm not sure.

Unlike with macOS, the standard Windows print dialog does not have options for black & white printing and for double-sided printing. The following two options are available in the advanced "Printing Preferences" dialog provided by the HP device driver:

• Print on both sides (manually) - checking this does not use the printer's auto-duplex unit, you have to manually re-insert the paper into the printer's paper feed to print the second side.
• Print in Grayscale - I'm not sure whether this really disables the use of the colour cartridges.

I assume that this poor support comes from the fact that by default Windows uses the printer driver for the "HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M477 (V3)" (driver version 8.00.1326.3536). At least that's what the "About" dialog box says in the "Printing Preferences" dialog. For this reason, it is necessary to install additional driver software on Windows.

Printer configuration on Windows

HP Easy Start:

• Navigate to 123.hp.com/laserjet (address comes from the installation leaflet that accompanies the device)
• Download and run the offered software. This is a programm named "HP Easy Start".
• The program automatically detects the printer device if the device is currently connected to the network and can be seen from the PC.
• Before you go ahead, I recommend disabling the two options that allow the software to send telemetry data to HP
  • These options are enabled by default, but the initial screen warns you about this and offers a link that pops up a window where the options can be disabled.
• Now continue and let HP Easy Start configure the printer for the E-Print service offered by HP (allows you to send documents to an email address and they will be forwarded to the printer for printing).
• After a few moments, HP Easy Start will automatically print a page that contains some information about how the printer was configured. The printer has been registered with HP and has been assigned a unique random email address, which looks something like this: randomaddress@hpeprint.com. To make this work you have to navigate to hpconnected.com, create an account and manage the printer from this account using the activation code you find on the page that was automatically printed by HP Easy Start. It's all pretty straightforward.
• The next step is to let HP Easy Start download and install a software package with the printer driver and additional software. In my case this failed because HP Easy Start tried for 50 minutes to download an 133 MB file with an abysmal download rate, then gave up. Fortunately HP Easy Start has a button that pops up a download page on support.hp.com that lets you manually download the software.

In my case the download page is this: https://support.hp.com/ch-de/drivers/selfservice/HP-Color-LaserJet-Pro-MFP-M477-series/7326560/model/7326586.

This lets me download the following packages:

• HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M477 Printer Series PCL 6 v3 Full Solution
  • Version = 16.0.19137.738
  • Publication date = 20 May 2019
  • File name = HP_Color_LJ_Pro_MFP_M477-PCL_6_v3_Full_Soln_19137.exe
• HP LaserJet Pro Series Windows Firmware Update Utility
  • Version = 20190113
  • Publication date = 25 January 2019
  • File name = HP_LaserJet_MPF_M477_M377_Series_FW_20190113.exe

HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M477 Printer Series PCL 6 v3 Full Solution

• This install the following pieces of software
  • HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M477 Scan Driver
  • HP Color LaserJet Pro MFP M477 PCL 6
  • HP Scan
  • HP Geräteerfahrung
  • I.R.I.S. OCR

Scan to ... configuration

When you select one of the "Scan to ..." functions on the printer for the first time, the device display shows a message that this function needs to be set up first. The message instructs you to open the Start Menu (presumably on Windows), select the "HP" folder, select "this product's" folder, then select "Scan to Email Setup" or "Scan to Network Folder Setup".

On my Windows machine there was no "HP" folder nor one of the two setup options. As an alternative the printer allows to setup the "Scan to..." functions via web interface.

Printer configuration via web interface

The printer's web interface is available under

https://192.168.178.66

The printer's integrated web server uses a self-signed certificate, so if your browser displays security warnings you have to ignore them.

These are the configuration changes that I have made so far:

• Networking tab
  • HTTPS Enforcement
    • Always use HTTPS when connecting to the printer's embedded Web server = Enable
• Scan tab
  • Network Folder Setup > Add entry with these settings
    • \\raspberrypi1\scanning
    • Username / password = See RaspberryPi wiki page
  • The default scanning settings can be set on the printer's display panel

Obsolete

HP LaserJet 1300n

A black&white HP LaserJet 1300n device did great services for us for about 16 years. The device had an Ethernet port which was great for integrating it with all of the household's desktop computers. The WindowsRecipes page has a relatively complicated recipe on how to install the appropriate printer driver under Windows. As usual, on macOS everything is much simpler and the device just works.