Mac driver for Samsung ML-1610
The ML-1610 Samsung laser printer has worked before on Leopard (OSX 10.5), I remember going to the Samsung site and downloading a driver–it was pretty painless then. For some reason, when I wiped out the installation of Leopard and installed Snow Leopard from scratch, the OSX driver on the Samsung site has disappeared, all of the drivers are for Windows.
After 2 hours of trial and error, installing drivers which are not working; I decided to try to see if Foomatic filters will have the answer–it did. Foomatic has it’s roots in UNIX, it is intended to be used with CUPS, if you have been using OSX for some time now, then you know it’s got CUPS for a printing system.
You will need to download and install some files into your Snow Leopard–don’t worry, none of the steps involved require command line acrobatics, they will download-and-double click steps.
1. Download the Ghostscript for Snow Leopard, it’s a 32mb file, after downloading has finished and it’s already mounted, double click the installer package.
2. Download Foomatic-RIP for Snow Leopard, it’s a small file, about 486kb, do the same thing as you did in Ghostscript, download and double click.
3. Download Samsung-GDI 1.816xx for OSX, same routine, download and double click the installer file.
4. Finally, plug the Samsung ML-1610 printer to your Snow Leopard, power it up, go to system preferences, select “print and fax”, then click the plus sign (+) to add a new printer. You should be able to see the ML-1610 detected as a USB printer. When you click the drop down combo box to select the printer driver, the ML-1610 should be an available choice now–select ML-1610, and now you are done.
You will need to follow the sequence as directed above. The Ghostscript should be installed first because Footmatic will look for it. Foomatic has to be installed first because the Samsung GDI installer will look for it.
I was only concerned about the Samsung ML-1610 when I searched for this procedure, but reading from the release notes of the Samsung-GDI installer, it appears that this driver can work for several other printers too, here’s the list of the all the other printers which this driver can power up.
Supported printers The Samsung-GDI.pkg installer includes support for 26 printers. Generic GDI Printer Lexmark E210 Samsung ML-200 Samsung ML-210 Samsung ML-1000 Samsung ML-1010 Samsung ML-1020 Samsung ML-1200 Samsung ML-1210 Samsung ML-1220 Samsung ML-1410 Samsung ML-1430 Samsung ML-1440 Samsung ML-1510 Samsung ML-1520 Samsung ML-1610 Samsung ML-1710 Samsung ML-1740 Samsung ML-1750 Samsung ML-2010 Samsung ML-2150 Samsung ML-2250 Samsung ML-2550 Samsung ML-4500 Samsung ML-5080 Samsung ML-6040
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