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switch parallel printer to USB?

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by shiz50

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I have a 10-yr-old Lexmark color laser. It has a parallel port only. I bought an "adaptor": a USB connection on one end to connect to the computer and a female parallel to connect to the end of the old parallel male end of the original cable.

The computer (P4, XP, 512MB) appears to recognize the printer USB connection but I am not able to send the print jobs.

2 replies

by robo_dev

Buy a PCI parallel adapter for your PC.

If the printer is a very dumb device, it does not require bi-directional communication, then a USB/parallel adapter of this sort may work. A device like an old HP laserjet series 2 comes to mind.

But if the device requires a bi-directional parallel connection, that capbility is not part of any parallel-to-usb adapter I've ever seen, therefore it will not work.

Even worse, some printers (typically HP) do not implement the PCL formatiing in the printer...it's done in the Windows driver in the PC, therefore this would not work either.
(host based printing).

If, by chance, that convertor does support bi-directional communication, then your cable may be wrong. There are two types of parallel cables...the skinny/cheap ones are not bi-directional versus the fat/expensive ones that are (there's some crude joke in there somewhere)

You best bet would be if Lexmark sold some sort of solution.

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