Raising an Epson 3000 from the dead

[JimMacQ]

A long time ago, the place I was working suddenly went out of business and I was able to carry off a lot of equipment, including an Epson 3000 printer (I'm not at my office right now and can't give you the exact model name; maybe Color Stylus 3000; it prints up to like 19' x 24" and can take rolls of paper or canvas or whatever). anyway, it's been sitting in storage since 2003, but I've set it up and want to use it. I changed the ink cartridges and ran the head cleaning about a dozen times, and it's not too bad now.

The big problem is what to hook it up to. I do my design work on a Mac, but it doesn't want to talk to this printer via a SCSI-USB adapter. For the moment, I'm saving everything as PDF, copying it to a flash drive and printing from a PC netbook, but that's a tedious workaround.

How do I drag this thing into the 21st century and OSX 10.5.8?

 

[jhanson]

Well, first off, it doesn't use SCSI for its interface, but instead a Centronics parallel port. I take it that USB-parallel adapters don't seem to be working on Mac OS X? I did find this article on Apple's site:

http://support.apple.com/kb/TS2858

You may want to try using a parallel to network adapter such as this SEH PS105 (which were used extensively with the Mutoh printers built around the Epson 3000's technology) or this D-link box.

 

[ruckusman]

You can get network cards for them if that's an easier solution, they go into a slot in the back located near the parallel cable interface, you just need to remove a cover plate

peace out

 

[artbot]

i had to buy a mac centronics card way back when i wanted to use my fj50 with my old mac. still have it. don't use it. back in the day it cost $450! thank you mac for making life so much easier.

 

[ruckusman]

Yep their machines are well engineered, but had to diagnose a non booting Mac Pro last week, turned out ot be a bad memory riser, luckily it had an LED to indicate the failure

Loved Silicon Graphics machines where you could just hook up a null modem cable to the serial ports, then fire up a terminal session, power it on and wait for it to tell you in plain english why it wouldn't post

IMO this should be standard on every machine manufactured

Why the older technology is ignored when not everything worth connecting/running isn't USB or firewire is beyone me