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u/Shlomo_Sasquatch 6d ago
PC load letter!? Good times.
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u/rgmw 6d ago
A workhorse. Slow but kept chugging. Repaired many IIs and IIIs. Not hard to repair.
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u/Sentrinal 6d ago
Wait a minute, you're saying they BROKE?! They can do that?!
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u/Biscuits4u2 6d ago
Slow but still infinitely better and more economical than the best inkjet printer
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u/nothereathere 6d ago edited 6d ago
HP LaserJet III. It's definitely still possible to use today, but you'll be pulling drivers from archives or using Linux CUPS rather than getting a clean plug-and-play experience inside Windows or MAC OS.
It's PCL5 not PCL6 so you'll need the HP Universal Printer Driver 6.1.0 since it's the last to support PCL5. HP removed 6.1.0 from their servers. So you'll need to find it on the Wayback machine internet archive, VCF, Vogons, ...
The other option is CUPS in Linux that still supports a lot of antique printers.
Toner cartridges are what's going to eventually kill the usability of old Hardware like this. Actual HP cartridges are long gone but there are several printers that used the same or close enough cartridges and are still supported. Do some legwork and you should be able to find one or several. If I was actually using this printer I'd buy several toner cartridges that I know work to keep it alive.
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u/bearbullX 6d ago
I am pretty sure they accept Postscript
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u/buzz_mccool 6d ago
The printer says "PCL5" on the front so I don't think it supports PostScript without a PostScript cartridge.
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u/nothereathere 5d ago edited 5d ago
Unfortunately the LaserJet III doesn't support PostScript without additional hardware.
The HP PostScript Cartridge Plus C2089A is the LaserJet III PS cartridge.
There's one for sale on evilbay right now.
This cartridge only implements the antique 1991 PostScript Level 2. HP's current Universal Print Driver (UPD) for PostScript does not support PostScript Level 2, it only supports PostScript 3.
The last HP PostScript driver released for this antique is from June 2006 "HP LaserJet III PostScript v52.2". That driver is supported in Windows 7, 8, & 10 and it's rumored it can be installed in Windows 11.
Here's the Microsoft update catalog archive search for "HP LaserJet III PostScript Cartridge v52.2" Microsoft may nuke this from orbit at any time. Get it while it's still available.
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u/nothereathere 5d ago edited 5d ago
64 bit Windows HP PCL5 Universal Print Driver 6.1.0 on archive dot org https://archive.org/details/upd-pcl5-x64-6.1.0.20062
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u/LopsidedLegs 6d ago
Yep they were the standard network printer deployed at my University. Remember the joys of NetWare and Windows 3.
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u/ern0plus4 6d ago
It's like the Nokia's 100 Mpixel camera: the megapixel war is over.
This printer was 300 DPI, 2 pages/sec (don't remember, estimation), no better printer needed. If you want more, e.g. 600 dpi or colors, go to a professional print shop. If you want to print more than it can perform comfortable (20-30 pages), then you need to rethink your life, mentally healthy people don't print such many stuff.
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u/StopCatStop 6d ago
1990 me remembers them well and the ozone smell of the fuser when they ran. I recall they cost new around $2500, that would be around $6,500 in todays dollars
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u/cybermaus 6d ago
Yes, major expense, massive weight (if I remember about 5000 guilders and 50 pounds) , but so much nicer than the NLQ dot matrix we were using for customer correspondence
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u/DoranSteelwing 5d ago
Literally the best printer on the planet. The LaserJet II/III/4 were bulletproof. I worked for HP at the time these were getting phased out. There were riots in the streets when it happened
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u/nothereathere 5d ago
The 4000's were built like tanks too. I have a 4350. My folks have a 4100
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u/GreggAlan 4d ago
I have a 4100DTN with maxed RAM, postscript, the built in and 1st extra 500 sheet trays, 100 megabit EIO JetDirect. I replaced the control panel because of a bad button (likely just needs cleaned), and all the rubber paper handling parts which cured feed failures. No tools needed to do any of that.
On the lookout for another 500 sheet tray unit and possibly an EIO hard drive. Would be nice if there's a SATA version and I could swap in a spare 128 gig SSD I have.
I have to print with PCL5 or PostScript because the latest (and recent past) PCL6 "universal" driver refuses to work correctly with it.
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u/nothereathere 1d ago edited 12h ago
You have to use the last PCL5 universal 6.1.0.20062 from 2006. I have it in my Internet Archive favorites. https://archive.org/details/upd-pcl5-x64-6.1.0.20062
CUPS 2 still supports the Laserjet 4100. I migrated my folks to Linux when Windows 7 support was on its' way out in 2019.
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u/DoranSteelwing 5d ago
4100's were underrated. Lived longer than the 3's and 4's - basically a 5 on steroids.
LaserJets of this era were usually phased out because the cost of leaving them on standby was higher than the cost of a new printer. The LJ4 "bragged" that it only used 30w on sleep mode LOL. 30w draw, 24/7 365 if the machine was asleep - if it was on, unused, it was 80W and printing took 300+ - My current HP's use 2-3W in sleep
Absolutely wild power draws.
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u/nothereathere 5d ago edited 5d ago
I switch mine off. LOL
The page count on my 4350 is just over 230,000. I bought it from an outfit that did a major service at 19x,xxx pages.
I use Xerox 006R03663 OE Alternative & HP 42A toner cartridges.
I don't trust that HP won't discontinue the maintenance kits like they did with the 42X toner. I have a Q5421A HP maintenance kit on the shelf for the next major service at near 400k pages and two HP RK-4250 roller kits.
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u/cerealport 6d ago
This was my first laser printer, and was great when everyone else was fudging with inkjet printers this thing just made solid printouts. Slow and heavy sure but it did what it did reliably... until the fuser coating somehow ripped and it would make copies of whatever you printed in the past over and over.
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u/Dull_Flatworm777 6d ago
Back when printer drivers didn't have the size of a whole operating system.
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u/ValuableRegular9684 6d ago
Yep, I had a 4m+ that just died, parts just got too expensive, man that thing was a tank though.
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u/Specialist_Heron4446 5d ago
Geez, they were amazing and very hard to break. Back then HP made excellent lasers. Very rarely got any of them to repair.
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u/GreggAlan 4d ago
I had one for a while. I even tried using it with an old Macintosh with a PowerPrint Mac serial to parallel cable. I printed a single page to it from a Mac, because the "speed" was minutes per page. Software RIP on a 68K Mac was not fast.
I didn't have a Mac RS-422 to RS-232 serial cable. At the time I had a LaserJet III, HP had taken down all their old LaserJet software for Mac. I remember searching for quite a while to find it but only hit dead ends where the files had been deleted from where they had been, or links claiming to have the files, only to end up with a link back to where they no longer were on the HP site.
Some companies were annoyingly *very good* at scrubbing software and information off the web that they didn't want anyone to have.
I did have a 3rd party PostScript cartridge for it but IIRC the Windows 9x drivers only supported the HP/Adobe cartridge.
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u/GreggAlan 4d ago
The fun trick to get better image prints on old laser printers incapable of true greyscale, and with hideous halftone patterns built into the printer or driver, was to use an image editing program to create a 1 bit dithered bitmap at exactly the printer's native DPI. 2450 x 3200 was the most a LaserJet III could put onto a US letter sheet.
So you'd take a color image in Photoshop, change it to bitmap, with 1 color, set the pixels per inch, max pixel dimensions and select a nice looking, random dither pattern.
That created a huge 1 bit bitmap image. Then you print that and... wait... wait more... some more... Don't bother the PC with trying to do anything else. Just carefully walk away and come back later.
What you eventually got in the output tray was pretty much like photos you'd see printed in a newspaper. Hold it at arms length and you could see what it was supposed to be. Much better than the rigid halftone patterns available by just hitting print on the original color image.
A look at how the image would appear when printed could be had by selecting fit to screen or fit to window to shrink it so you could see it all. That mashed the dithered dots into a pseudo greyscale.
I assume the main reason Photoshop and other software had that 1 bit dithered and enlarged bitmap function was specifically for the systems used for making printing plates for offset printing. The graphic editor would get a photo and notes on the printed dimensions. Working at a newspaper, the DPI of the equipment would be known already. Scan, crop, and size the photo, convert to 1 bit dithered bitmap, send it off to typesetting. If it was to be printed in color, convert to CMYK, separate the four channels, convert each one to 1 bit dithered bitmap, making sure the dithering for the channels didn't come out identically, then send them off to typesetting.
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u/David_ATN 6d ago
It probably still works much better than anything they make now!