NEC SuperScript 870 Gripes

I purchased an NEC SuperScript 870 printer in December 1998 and have lived with it for almost 4 years (as of this writing). The most important gripe with it is that it has multiple personalities. When it is directly attached to a Windows 98/95 machine it is a full featured printer with lots of bells and whistles. However when it resides on a LAN and is accessed from Windows NT4 there are no bells, no whistles, no options at all.

For example, under NT4 the print quality is limited to the printer default and it doesn’t even tell you what that is.

The printer driver for Windows NT4 is a universal driver from Microsoft that is 128k in size. In contrast, the  printer driver for Windows 98 is from NEC and is 2.1 meg. NEC confirmed my experience, that the driver for NT4 is less functional than the one for Windows 95/98. It is brutally less functional, omitting the ability to print in draft mode, average quality or high quality.

The Status Monitor supplied with the printer does not run (or even install itself) under NT4. The User's Guide that came with the printer (May 1998, part number 808-878281-011-A) does not say that the Status Monitor is only for Windows 98/95, but NEC confirmed it (I thought at first that I had installed the NEC software wrong). In fact the chapter on the Status Monitor in the User's Guide (chapter 4) never mentions Windows NT at all. Mute. Although NEC gets to advertise that the printer supports Windows NT4, in reality, NT is missing 80% (my guess) of the Windows 95/98 functionality. 

NEC has never upgraded the printer driver for NT4. I found this out after trying to see if I had the latest driver installed which turned out to be impossible (without help from NEC). The NEC 870 printer driver page only tells you the date of the latest driver (July 9, 1998). Under Windows NT4 I could not figure out how to get the date of the currently installed driver. Printing a test page prints the version of the driver (4.01in my case) but does not print the date of the driver. NEC does not tell users the version of the latest driver, only the date, so I had to email them just to see if I had the latest version.  

In July 1999, NEC said via email that they would be posting a new driver soon. This turned out not to be true. In fact, they never updated the NT4 driver at all, but did post a new Windows 2000 driver soon after the new OS was released. 

NEC does not have an email list where you can sign up and be automatically notified of new drivers and any other relevant info about the printer. HP does this. To manually check you have to look at the printer driver page. I have no idea how you find out about updates to the Status Monitor which is from Adobe. 

In October 1999, I tried to install the drivers on an ultra-thin laptop that has no CD-ROM drive. After some poking around on my own, it turns out this is possible because the drivers are stored on the CD in floppy disk images. Great. My gripe is that NEC never tells you this. I had to discover it by looking at the directories on the CD. The readme file or the User Guide should have this sort of information, both say nothing about installing from floppy disks. I have done this a few times and the last time ran into a problem because of Windows Explorer on the computer with the CD-ROM drive. In this case I created the floppy disks by selecting all the files in the directories called "disk1" and "disk2". However, Windows Explorer was configured not to show hidden, system files so all the required files were not copied to the floppy disks. 

December 1999 from Windows 98 with the printer on a LAN, hooked up to a print server:  I tried to print to the printer but had forgotten to turn it on. So what you say? Well, Windows 98 detected the problem and told me about it and set me up to use the printer in offline mode. Sounds good so far. However, after this the computer no longer prints. Period. This went on for over a week. It survived reboots of the machine, the printer and the print server. There was nothing wrong with the network hardware, using Network Neighborhood I could see the print server and the printer and the other machine on my LAN. Print jobs would go to the print spool and stay there forever, typically with no error messages. Eventually I deleted the printer definition from Windows 98, rebooted, then went into the Control Panel add/remove software applet and deleted the printer driver and rebooted again (for good luck). The i re-installed the printer and the printer driver and all was well. In fairness to NEC, it might have been a Windows 98 bug. 

One problem that stems from not being able to adjust the print quality in NT4 effects highlighted text. When printing a Word document with some text highlighted in red, the result is a black blob. The highlighting printed so dark that the text could not be read. Word has an option to print in draft quality, but it made no difference, the text was still not readable.   

Installing the Printer Driver

The installation of the printer driver is brutally complicated, much more so than any other drivers that I have ever had to install. I seem to have misplaced most of my notes with the details on this. What follows is merely an appetizer. 

The process starts with four things you can install, the printer driver being only one of them. There is no online help to explain what the other three things are. One of the choices is fairly obvious, its clip art. As for the other two, no one could possibly know what they are. One of these is ATM, but its neither the machine you get cash from nor the high speed networking protocol. 

If you chose to install only the printer driver, it doesn’t do it. Instead you are given another menu of choices, one of which is to install the printer driver. 

After the printer definition is added in Windows 98/95, it then installs the status monitor package. However this comes out of the blue, with no clue at all its going to happen and no explanation as to what a status monitor is.  

You have to install the user guide for the printer separately from the print driver. 

Installing the driver in Windows 98:  

• On one computer, it defaulted to picking up an INF file from a Windows 95 folder. If not for my browsing the folders on the NEC software CD-ROM ahead of time, I would not have known there was a another folder for Windows 98. This however was not consistent on other Windows 98 computers that I installed the driver onto. 

• Part of the process is the Add Printer Wizard. However, the printer does not show up in the list of available printers, leaving you with no choice but to click on the "have disk" button. There is no help provided about what to do here. You are left to your own devices to navigate to the directory where the printer driver is. Of course I went to the drive letter where the CD-ROM was but it did not like that. I guessed at the "SS870" directory, but it didn't like that either. Then I guessed at the the "WIN98" subdirectory of the SS870 directory and it liked that. 

• After installing the printer, you are asked if you want to print a test page. I said yes and now I'm back to installing software again. No test page printed. Instead, the status monitor wants to be installed. Why? On one machine that I kept good notes with, I said that the printer was network based, not locally attached. The status monitor does not work with network printers, so why install it? 

• It puts the status monitor in the startup program group without asking. 

• After installing a network instance of the printer (that is, not a locally attached printer), the status monitor (which got invoked automatically at boot time as per the last gripe) complained about the ECP parallel port. Hello? The printer is network attached. Its not using the parallel port at all! Its nice to know that the status monitor also does not work with ECP type parallel ports. Add it to the list of things it does not support (see below). 

FYI: The software CD-ROM has images of floppy disks that can be used to install the printer driver. There are images of two floppy disks for Windows 95/98 and two for Windows NT4. To install the printer and printer driver from disk1 of the Windows 95/98 floppy disk images, run SETUP.EXE. From the first window, select the Add Printer button. When Windows displays the list of all the printers it knows about, click on the Have Disk button and navigate your way to the root directory of this first floppy disk. 

Installing the driver under Windows 95:  

• After the printer definition is added, you are asked if you want to print a test page. Earlier the software warned to reboot before doing anything. Ooops, I said yes to the question about printing a test page. The result? Lots of pages of garbage. To prevent the spam printing, I turned off the printer and as a result it jammed. Why ask the user a question when the answer must be NO? At the least, there should have been a warning about this before the add printer wizard is invoked in Windows 95. 

Status Monitoring on a LAN

My SuperScript 870 is hooked to a NetGear PS104 which is both an Ethernet hub and a print server. The below experiences were on a machine running Windows 98. The monitoring software is the Adobe PrintGear Status Monitor version 2.0100 dated April 10, 1998.

When I installed the printer software on a Windows 98 machine, I was looking forward to using the Status Monitor after months of printing from NT4 without it. The Status Monitor did nothing. Why? It only works when the printer is directly attached to your computer.  More specifically, all the features of the Status Monitor only work if the printer is directly attached. If the printer is on a LAN, most the status monitor does not work. 

The User's Guide (page 4-1) says: "If you are sharing your SuperScript 870 printer using a Network Interface Card features like Pause, Resume, Reset will also be available although only from the printer's operator panel, not with the Status Monitor".  This is a roundabout way of saying these three features are not available. 

But what of the many other features of the Status Monitor? Fuggghedaboutit. The User's Guide says (page 4-2): 
"If a SuperScript 870 printer is connected with a print sharing device less detailed but still very useful printer status information is available, including printer error, paper out, busy or ready'"
Very useful? Not in my opinion. 

The Alerts feature does not work when the printer is on a LAN. The User's Guide fails to mention this and the software fails to inform you of this, even though it knows that printing is directed to the network. Not so alert Alerts. 

When the computer is unplugged from the network, the Status Monitor does not know, it does not say or indicate anything. Some monitor. 

To test the ready indicator in the Status Monitor, I used the printer to make sure all was well, then turned the printer off and the status monitor indicated nothing. I see nothing. I hear nothing. 

As for paper out, the User's Guide is wrong. I tested this and again, the Status Monitor did not inform me of the out of paper condition. I think the User's Guide was written assuming the printer is attached to a LAN via its own optional network interface card. In my case, the printer was hooked up to a print server, a subject NEC never addressed. 

Printing Blank Pages

The printer does not seem to know when it is ready to print. Both these instances have been from Windows NT4 using the printer attached to a print server on a LAN, my normal environment. 

December 1999: When I try to print to the printer too quickly after turning it on, it prints blank pages. Doing nothing but waiting a minute, fixes the problem. The same thing happened after the printer had been on a while and had one to sleep. It woke up and printed blank pages. 

July 18, 2000: This happened three times today. After the first occurrence the printer was turned off for hours. When I turned it on again, I made to sure to watch the status lights and did not try and print until the green light was solidly on. Nonetheless, it printed a blank page. I reprinted the page just fine, but only a couple minutes later it printed another blank page.

July 30, 2000:  More blank pages (from Word97). It was the first print job after turning on the printer, but the printer had been on for quite a while, long enough to warm up. I printed a 12 page document and all 12 pages printed blank. 

September 21, 2000:  More blank pages from Word97. There seems to be no way around this and it is not consistent. Even after the printer warms up and prints pages normally, it will still go to sleep and then print blank pages the next time. 

Printer Drivers Again

November 11, 2000:  The NEC web site has been redesigned. The old web page with the printer drivers, has been replaced by a new page. This new page is however not dedicated to printer drivers, but a general NEC tech support page. Selecting printers, then the specific printer model, ends you up at a new support page dedicated to this printer. This would not be a cause for griping, except this new page offers less information about the printer driver than the old page. The old page told you the date of the latest driver for your operating system. This page does not. As a result there is no way to know when a new version of the printer driver is released. Of course, it is pretty obvious to date that NEC is not going to update the drivers anyway.  Also, the new page does not have a section devoted to printer drivers. 

May 30, 2001: The new support page for this printer does not say that there is an available printer driver for Windows 2000. There is. This page now has no direct link to printer drivers. There is a drop down list box with choices about different information available about the printer. None of the choices are drivers. However, the Software Installation option eventually will lead to drivers although this is not at all clear and obvious. The Q&A section has links to all the printer drivers, except the one for Windows 2000.  
FYI: I found a new link to the old printer driver page. As of July 2003, this link works. 
Update: As of May 2003, the new support page referred to above is no longer valid. This is the second time NEC has changed the location of the support page for this printer. 

December 28, 2001. The Windows 2000 driver for this printer is not digitally signed. Signing is an integrity check for Windows 2000 software and because this driver is not signed, you get a warning asking if you want to install it anyway. The instructions about installing the driver under Windows 2000 are only for a locally attached printer to the parallel port. There are no instructions for installing a LAN based version of the printer. Fortunately, the process is basically the same. My printer is attached to a LAN based print server (a piece of hardware).  

Are You There?

November 20, 2000:  Like many computer devices, this printer goes into sleep mode after a period of inactivity. The problem with it however, is that the green indicator light that tells you the printer is on, also goes to sleep. Rather than burn a constant green, it blinks. Very slow blinks. So slow, that you can easily look at the indicator lights on the top of the printer and see them all off and think the printer is off. When its sleeping, it does make its usual hum either so you can't judge if its on or off by listening. It can be on, but give every outward appearance of being off. 

Foiled by my Parallel Port

Broken

April 5, 2001:  A relative of mine owns this printer and after about 1.5 years it broke. The paper feed through the printer but nothing actually printed, except dirt smudges. A benefit of having two of the same printers in one family is that you can mix and match parts. We tried three different toner cartridges and two different print heads in both printers. Every removable component worked in one printer, none worked in the other printer. The troubleshooting section of the user manual says that a problem like this is probably due to the toner cartridge. We certainly proved that was not the case with this printer. 

NEC was called on the phone and since the printer comes with a two year warranty, they agreed to repair it. The printer documentation clearly says the user pays to ship the printer to NEC and they pay to ship it back which seems fair enough to me.  NEC returned the printer quickly (about a week) and fixed it just fine.   

Printing from a Macintosh

FYI:  February 24, 2003. One reader wrote about using the printer with Mac OS X:  The Macintosh doesn't have a parallel port, but the printer is recognizable using a USB to parallel converter cable. But there is no Mac OS X driver. Taking advantage of the fact that OS X is really Unix and can use CUPS, he got it working with a LaserJet IIP driver. For CUPS open source software he suggests: gimp-print.sourceforge.net/MacOSX.php3  

FYI: February 17, 2005. Another reader (thanks Alan) wrote about using the NEC 870 with Mac OS X 10.3 (Panther). He confirmed the above, that the printer works with the HP LaserJet IIP driver. In his case, he connected to it over SAMBA by sharing the printer from a Windows machine. But he wanted to print wirelessly  so he bought the NIC card for the 870 and the printer is connected to his LAN. For Windows he used the IP-P2P software to make this work. For Mac OS X it took experimentation to figure out. The steps are:

• Create an "IP Printing" printer. Pick "LPD/LPR". For the printer address, enter the IP address of the 870's NIC.
• The tricky (and not documented) part is that for the "Queue name", enter "PORTnnnn" where nnnn is the "Base Port Number" PLUS ONE. The Base Port Number is found on the administration page for TCP/IP of the web site served up by the NIC.
• Finally, pick the driver HP Laserjet IIP

For example, if the NIC is configured to be at 10.10.10.70, you would go to the web page: http://10.10.10.70/tcpip to see a Base Port Number of 500. It could be anything, since you can edit it, but assume it says 500. When you set up the printer you enter a queue name of "PORT501" (without the quotes).

FYI: July 2, 2006. A reader named Stephen wrote to say that the above advice from Alan worked for him too under Mac OSX. But he adds that he has never been able to get the NIC's webpage to come up. Every time he powers up the printer or holds the 'ready' button for a bit, the 870 prints a status page for the NIC and the last line gives you the port number. Then he added 1 to that port number and all was well. 

FYI: October 1, 2006. A reader of this page said: "The latest version of Gimp-Print (now called Gutenprint) on Mac OS X has a driver for the 870, so you longer have to use the Laserjet IIP driver." On an Intel Mac Pro running OS X 10.4.8 with a parallel to USB cable, he plugged the 870 into the Mac which recognized it right away.

FYI: October 2, 2006. A reader offered these suggestions for connecting the printer to a Mac: "The tricky (and not documented) part is that for the "Queue name", enter "PORTnnnn" where nnnn is the "Base Port Number" PLUS ONE. The Base Port Number is found on the administration page for TCP/IP of the web site served up by the NIC. My printer is connected to a Netgear router FR114P. I've created the queue on the router called FR11P_P1. I've used this name instead of PORTnnnn. I did not find the Ginp-Print in the list of printers and used HP Laserjet II, which has words "gimp-print beta" in its description. I am using Mac OS X 10.4.7."

Windows Vista Drivers

FYI: Regarding Windows Vista, a reader wrote to say this: On Release Candidate 1 this printer works fine. From the install new printer Wizard, first select HP, then HP Laser Jet. October 28, 2006.

FYI: A reader of this page wrote to say that he successfully installed the HP LaserJet IIP driver inside Windows Vista for Business to print to a Superscript 870 printer.  February 6, 2007.

FYI: A reader of this page wrote to say that she got the NEC 870 to print via a DLink 714P+ (a wireless router with a Print Server) using the HP IIP drivers under Windows Vista Home Premium. March 12, 2007.

FYI: August 26, 2007. A reader of this page named Vince emailed me with his exeriences. He tried the Vista HP LaserJet IIp driver but found that when printing from applications such as Word or Outlook, there were extra lines and garbage symbols printing. But he did get the NEC SuperScript 870 working perfectly in Windows Vista with features such as 600x600 DPI resolution and N-up page printing. He runs it off a D-Link DP-300u ethernet print server.

Vince suggested, right clicking on the Add Printer window and select "Run as Administrator", then "Add a Printer". When you get to picking the driver, insert a Windows XP install CD, and browse to the i386 directory. You should see a list of digitally signed XP drivers. Select the NEC SuperScript 870 and you are good to go. He has been using it in Vista Ultimate and Office 2007, Outlook 2007, QuickBooks 2007 and lots of other programs without a single problem.

October 3, 2007. A reader named Michael offered a follow-up to this. He confirmed that the Windows XP driver permits 600x600 dpi printing from Vista (he has the Home Premium edition). He too needed to use the XP drivers, having confirmed that LaserJet II (and III) worked, but at only 300X300 dpi. However, he did not have access to the XP install disk; a copy of ntprint.inf and the drivers.cab are all that is necessary. Clicking on Add Printer brings up the Print Driver wizard. Click on have disk, browse to location of ntprint.inf, click OK. This loads the information Vista needs to load the driver; He kept a window open to a folder containing drivers.cab and when prompted for a file, he extracted the files from the cab file. In the end, he got his NEC 870 Superscript working through a NetGear Mini Print Server (PS101).

 

Windows XP Driver Issues

FYI: October 5, 2002.  A reader of this web site wrote to say that under Windows XP he has used the Minolta QMS PageWorks/Pro 8L printer driver with the NEC 870 printer for over a year without problems. He says the Status Monitor doesn't work, but the printer is faster and the envelope feature works. XP recognizes the NEC 870 and has a printer definition for it. However, it can also have printer definition for a Minolta printer that controls the same NEC 870 printer. I have not tried this. 

FYI: October 16, 2002. Another reader wrote to say that after having problems printing from Windows 2000 Professional, he was advised by NEC technical support to use the HP LaserJet IIP driver included in Windows. I have not tried this.

FYI: November 14, 2002. Another reader said that Windows XP recognized the printer and installed a driver automatically but that it printed garbage. Then they replaced the 870 driver with the driver for the HP LaserJet IIP (after reading the above FYI) and it  works. I have not tried this, but a few readers have confirmed this works. 

FYI:   January 31, 2003. Many readers have written me with problems using this printer under Windows XP. One found that older print cables were the cause of the printer being slow. A new standard Parallel cable speeded it up. A related topic, that I have not investigated, is that all printer ports are not the same. There are at least three types and you can usually set the BIOS to make your printer port act like any of the three types. Perhaps this effects printer speed?

FYI:  September 8, 2003. Another reader wrote with her Windows XP experiences with this printer. She found the LaserJet IIP driver works very fast, but is limited to 300dpi. She tried the 600dpi drivers for the LaserJet4 and 4+, but they did not print properly. She also found that the Minolta QMS PageWorks / Pro 8L driver works at 600 dpi, but it did not seem much faster than the 870 driver. With the 870 driver she tried the SPP/EPP/ECP parallel port settings, and found none of them made any difference. She also has a high quality IEEE 1284 cable so that is not the problem. Someone at David Gagne.net reports that the underlying problem is that Adobe abandoned the PrintGear software NEC chose for the 870. There are gripes there too. 

FYI: January 8, 2005. Another reader wrote with their experience using a QMS driver. The driver is available at www.qms.com/support/current_printers/win_xp.html. When you run the EXE file it is not obvious where the files get extracted to. The drive is unsigned so Windows XP will object to installing it. 

FYI: January 26, 2004. I finally got around to using the printer from Windows XP. The NEC 870 driver built into XP was indeed extremely slow, as I had been warned. While IE6 was printing a 7 page document, Task Manager showed it as "not responding".  I also found that Minolta PageWorks 8L driver worked fine, as readers of this page had said. I tried both the version of this driver built into XP and the NT4 version which is linked to above. They seemed to be exactly the same. The driver is not for a PageWorks Pro 8L as a reader had said, but is instead for a PageWorks 8L (no Pro). Windows XP objected to all these drivers because they were not digitally signed. 

FYI: August 5, 2004. A reader wrote to say that the Windows XP driver is probably slower because it's generating PCL output with a special 600-dpi header on it. The XP driver does not use PrintGear output (a bit encoding method). HP LaserJet IIP driver may be quicker, but it's only 300dpi.

The readers had failed to mention my biggest issue with this printer, the lack of print quality options. That is, under NT4, 2000 and XP there is no choice for draft mode vs. normal mode vs. presentation mode. This was unfortunately also true under Windows XP with all the drivers I tried.