Phew!

Long time readers will know that I use a Hewlett Packard DesignJet 90 to make large prints using my iMac. I suggested it made little sense to rush into the OS 10.6 upgrade (Snow Leopard) until many of the incompatibility issues were resolved. Indeed, Snow Leopard has already had one upgrade to address security issues since I wrote that piece.

Well, some good news. HP has released new printer drivers for the DJ 30/90/130 series (respectively 13″, 18″ and 24″ wide) as stated in this Apple Support document. This is great news for those of us using what may be one of the best ink dye printers made. While recently discontinued, I confess prints made with it today look every bit as good as they ever did! My only grumbles have been the occasional blocked printer head, easily replaced. Click ‘Printing‘ on the right for more about this outstanding piece of hardware for serious sized printing.

Update 1/2016:

There is one more benefit to keeping a Snow Leopard boot drive handy. SL was the last version of OS X to include Rosetta, the emulation software which allows Intel Macs to run PPC (IBM G3/4/5 CPU) apps. This is important if you want to run the HP online System Maintenance Utility which is coded to work with PPC CPUs only. And you really want to be able to run that utility as it is the only definitive way of identifying printhead issue, allowing you to hone in on the faulty head – see Page 3-10 in that linked PDF. See here for details.

Snow Leopard – the last great OS from Apple before the tinkerers took over.

You can still buy Snow Leopard from Apple for $20. This is not altruism or nostalgia on Apple’s part. Rather, SL (10.6) was the first version of OS X (from 10.6.4) to permit access to the AppStore wherefrom all subsequent OS X upgrades are made over the air, Apple no longer shipping OS X on DVDs. So without SL you cannot access the AppStore.

I actually use an old PPC iMac G4 to access HP’s utility but you can do just as well using SL for less trouble.