All printers Mac compatible?

[SupremeRuler99]

At school there was an old (no more than three years I would say) Brother laser printer lying around doing NOTHING. I asked the Tech guy if I could borrow it to see if it would plug into the Macs in the e-Mac suite because I wanted to do some printing. He claimed that is was not Mac compatible (I can't remember the actual Brother model number). He would even let me borrow it to see if it WOULD work. I mean, it wasn't doing anything! The printer was sitting on a shelf waiting to be thrown away! I was under the imression that printers were multi platform, ie they can be used on Macs and PCs?!

 

[horndude]

nope, many many printers require special drivers to work, unless the printer is postscript compatible its not likely to work with any PC without a special driver, most OS's can do postscript natively though

 

[macdude425]

Yep, even if you tried it wouldn't work.

 

[The_Shocker]

If you get the rite drivers

drivers

 

[macdude425]

Not necessarily.

There could also be firmware differences, or more complicated differences.

 

[SupremeRuler99]

I see... meh - it was worth a try. But - I could still steal it from him! Mwa ha ha ha ha ha ha!

 

[ShadowFalls]

here you go, a link to some info relating to Brother Printers and MACs
http://www.brother.com/E-ftp/macosxstate-us.htm