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Re: [LUG] HP Printer and 2-sided printing

 

On 10/12/12 21:24, Neil Winchurst wrote:
> Recently bought an HP Photosmart 5520 printer. Very good so far.
> However, according to the info with the printer itself it is supposed
> to support 2-sided printing. By this I take it to mean it will print
> page 1 say on a sheet of paper and then pick up the same sheet again
> and print page 2 on the other side.
>
> I have had a good search around, but must be missing something. Can
> anyone (bad apple??) point me in the right direction please? I realise
> that I could do it all manually, but as it is supposed to be able to
> do it for me I might as well try to get it to work.
>
> Thanks
>
> Neil
>

There is no way a basic inkjet printer such as your new HP will have the
actual hardware for duplex printing, by which I mean the ability to suck
the stack of printed paper back in and print straight to the other side
- that's strictly a higher end feature, and usually only found on high
quality inkjets for graphics shops and big laserjets. What HP mean when
they say it supports 2-sided printing is that it will indeed do duplex
(you may need to check a print dialogue setting before you send the job
to the printer) but your hands will be the physical method of conveying
the half-printed stack of sheets back to the feed tray. The printer will
be smart enough (probably!) to prompt you via it's little built-in
screen or by a dialogue box on your monitor that when it's finished
printing the first side, to take out the stack, flip it along one or
more of it's axis, and feed the stack back in to finish up. This is more
useful than it sounds, as otherwise you'll probably end up printing one
side upside down, or get the page order backwards, etc. So it's sort of
'half manual' duplex if you see what I mean. You still have to feed the
paper, but it should take care of the rest itself.

Obviously, it would be wise to test this on a small (4-5 pages of very
minimal text to save ink) job first to make sure it works properly
before sending a complete copy of the Lindisfarne Gospels or something
as a duplex job.

Hope that makes sense.

Cheers

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