[Hands0n]

Any of you Mac or Un*x gurus out there care to comment or offer direction.

I have a Brother MFC-5840CN printer which is networked to my LAN. It works fine from Windoze PeeCees. But in the Mac world things get very dire indeed.

The Mac uses CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) drivers to print to the Brother - and mostly anything else for that matter. But for some reason that I cannot fathom or find info on Tinternet it is excruciatingly slow. For example, an A4 photo is still printing after 26 hours!! Not a very good advertisement for Apple Mac.

To be fair, I have seen lots of people asking in other forums what to do but the answers are either not forthcoming, or just do not work/apply to the Mac.

I cannot be the only Mac user in this state of near-desperation. So I wonder if any of you chaps have found this problem and fixed it, or have ideas.

[Ben]

Do Brother not offer any Mac drivers? It rather serves you right for buying a Brother printer, doesn't it :D

All the HP's that I've used show up instantly in OS X without configuration, including the icon being the actual picture of the printer! Lol. The HP colour laser at work loves Macs and PC's alike, and in relative terms it was cheap as chips considering it was network ready and is as efficient as anything - the toners are still over half full and it'll be two years old this year.

I've just been really unhelpful, I know. Sorry. Fwiw, I think mine is a 3000n, but this one (http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=3PJZ&SearchType=1&CategorySelectedId=11113&SearchTerms=hp+colour+laser&PageMode=3&SearchKey=All&SearchMode=All&NavigationKey=11113) on Dabs looks pretty nice. I have a HP multifunction thing at home which I wont recommend... plus it's eons old.

Lots of things work with Macs these days, but some things, well, they just don't.

[Hands0n]

I'm not changing my Printer, grrrrrrrrr :D

Brother state that it is Apple Mac compatible, so it has to be.

I think its this darned CUPS stuff that is giving the trouble. Its a 100Mbps LAN port to the printer, and a 1,000Mbps for the Mac so not a LAN issue. PrinterProxy is using 1.3% of the Mac Pro's CPU so its not like its overloaded.

Lots of CUPS issues out in the 'net too .....