Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Ticket printer just stops printing

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Posted by Mike Blakesley (Member # 26) on 04-04-2008, 08:25 PM:

We have a SRP-350PG Samsung printer connected via regular ol' printer cable to our ticket-selling computer (running RTS). Sometimes this printer will just stop for no reason at all, right in the middle of everything. Sometimes I can fix it by just turning the printer off and on again, but the last couple of days it's been taking a reboot to get it going. When I reboot, all the tickets still print, so they're getting hung up in the spooler for some reason.

Anybody ever seen this issue and what did you do about it? I looked at the RTS message board and found nada. Or is the thing just wearing out? It's about 3.5 years old.

Posted by Monte L Fullmer (Member # 2797) on 04-04-2008, 09:51 PM:

Got a spare to try out, or one that you can borrow?

Sounds like that Samsung unit has reached its limit-outside the printer drivers (or, even the software drivers for your program) have begun to decay, is getting corrupt and needs to be reinstalled.

Posted by Chris Slycord (Member # 4239) on 04-04-2008, 11:07 PM:

It's not surprising that your stuff will print after reboot.

The software on your computer will communicate with the printer to find out if it's running or for status on the part of the print job sent to the printer. Lots of printer software only discards a print job from the queue when the printer acknowledges that the entire thing finished printing. So it's not so much that the job is getting "hung up in the spooler" rather than the printer failing doesn't cause the queue to be flushed.

It's possible for the software to be the source of failure but the more likely culprit is the printer itself.

So my recommendation is kinda reiterating Monte's:
Try installing a clean copy of the printer's driver and if you're using a non-standard piece of printing software, perhaps getting a clean reinstall of that too. Also if you have a spare printer cable try inserting that; having a short in it could cause random stoppages in communication. And if those don't work it's the printer.

Posted by Jeremy Weigel (Member # 4208) on 04-05-2008, 01:06 AM:

We have had a similar issue for a couple of years with one of our BOCA Ghostwriter Series 2 printers. When we go to print the ticket(s) we'll get a message to the effect that the RTS software can not communicate with the printer and give us an option to restart the software. If I turn the printer off and back on after a few seconds the tickets will then print. If we restart the software the tickets are accounted for, but they won't print. I too checked the RTS boards and found nothing. I just figured it had to be an occasional printer problem.

Posted by Brad Allen (Member # 470) on 04-05-2008, 06:54 PM:

Try replacing the printer cable with a brand spanking new one.
I had a Samsung SRP running with RTS, that at times would print pure gibberish, after working fine for over a year.

New printer cable solved that problem.