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Author Topic: Problems with Samsung SRP-350 printers Frank Cox Film God Posts: 2234 From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada Registered: Apr 2011 posted 09-17-2012 02:26 AM                        Many printers have a built-in "test page" that you can print to be sure that the printer itself is working. Do your printers have that, and does it print? Can you print to your printers from software other than your cash register program? I don't know much about how printers are set up with MS Windows, but is there a test page that you can print from your computer to the printer? (With UNIX CUPS, you can just navigate to the listing for your printer on the localhost:631 webpage and click the "print test page" button -- perhaps there is something similar in Windows?) Based on what you have posted so far, I don't think you have yet narrowed the problem down to an issue with the printers themselves (or the connection cables, etc), an issue with the MS Windows printer drivers and/or installation, or an issue with your cash register software. The first thing I would try is printing a few lines to the printer using something like Notepad, and see what, if anything, happens.  |  IP: Logged Kevin Fairchild Expert Film Handler Posts: 125 From: Kennewick, WA, USA Registered: Oct 2008 posted 09-17-2012 09:43 AM                     What drivers are you using? With our SRP-350 we use the standard text-only driver from Microsoft. Are you having problems with all print jobs? Credit card receipts, gift card receipts, tickets, etc.? Does your computer have serial or parallel ports? It so, give those a try. We have both parallel and usb interfaces and both seem to work fine for us.  |  IP: Logged Mike Blakesley Film God Posts: 12767 From: Forsyth, Montana Registered: Jun 99 posted 09-17-2012 12:49 PM                        When the printer stops, it won't print from anything -- software, notepad or whatever -- but it WILL still print its own internal test page. I put in the aforementioned upgrade cards (which convert the printers from parallel to USB type ports on the back) and installed brand-new USB cables. After another 90 minutes on the phone with RTS this morning, all seems to be working correctly NOW. We'll see what happens tonight when we actually use them to sell stuff. The tech from RTS set up a "direct to USB" type of driver that fixed the problem. I remain skeptical this'll work in the long term but we'll see. At least my concession crew is learning good practices in "how to deal with computer problems." So there's a silver lining of sorts.  |  IP: Logged Frank Cox Film God Posts: 2234 From: Melville Saskatchewan Canada Registered: Apr 2011 posted 09-17-2012 02:13 PM                        What that tells you is that the printer itself hasn't locked up, therefore one potential source of the problem is now eliminated. When you have problems with the printer, does it happen immediately when you start printing receipts, or after a few receipts have been printed? One thing that might be interesting to try would be to set up a little program (batch file, whatever) that prints a single line of text to the printer. Run that between each receipt that you print. Find out if the printer locks up consistently when printing the receipt, printing the single line, or randomly with both of the printouts. This will help to isolate the problem to your cash register software or the printer driver. Better yet, can you capture a dummy receipt and print that between each real receipt instead of a simple line of text? That might tell you if there's something funky about, for example, any graphics that are printed on your receipt. Note that the dummy receipt that you print between the real receipts shouldn't printed through the cash register software, since the objective is to find out if the cash register software is at fault. Further thought: Does Windows have a printer status page? If so, what does it say about your printer when it's not working? For example, I can look at the status page for my printers and see messages like "printer online", "printer idle", "printer turned off", "printer on fire", and so on. (Yes, "printer on fire" is a real error message.) Further thought #2: Are you using any graphics or fancy fonts on your receipts? If so, what happens if you stop doing that and just print the plainest of plain-jane receipts -- no boldface, no underline, no double-size, no graphics of any kind.  |  IP: Logged Mike Blakesley Film God Posts: 12767 From: Forsyth, Montana Registered: Jun 99 posted 09-17-2012 05:53 PM                        quote: Frank Cox When you have problems with the printer, does it happen immediately when you start printing receipts, or after a few receipts have been printed? That's the maddening thing. Sometimes it quits mid-shift; other times it'll work for days and then be "not working" when we start a shift. There's absolutely no pattern at all that I can figure out. But I'm hoping that whatever the guy did today will take care of it. We don't use any non-default fonts or graphics. Plus there is the fact that everything was working flawlessly until: 1. We got the new concession computer 2. We installed the latest build of RTS And I've swapped the printers back and forth between the computers and the problem keeps floating back and forth to either or both printers, so I think it's gotta be software-related.  |  IP: Logged Jerome Holmes Film Handler Posts: 35 From: San Jose, Ca Registered: Nov 2008 posted 09-17-2012 09:00 PM                     Hey Mike - We have issues with our SRP-350's. On our first install (all machines running a business XP or something), all of them were connected via basic serial and were FAR TOO SLOW to be very useful. Next install was mostly those converters you linked us to (IFA-U), which worked up to a point, but were unreliable, and would occasionally (and randomly) stop printing (which I attribute to being an OS issue, and not a hardware issue). Our latest iteration has had good results, using the SRP-350IIPG. These printers come from the manufacture with printer cards instead of serial cards or USB cards (IFG-Ptype card). Dominic Espinosa knows a little bit more about our setup than I do, but I had to troubleshoot our system a bunch when we had the USB style card rather than the new printers. Maybe he'll drop by the thread?  |  IP: Logged

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