I’ve been meaning to write this post for a while but haven’t gotten around to it. I’ve been using Linux Mint (Ubuntu variant) as my primary desktop for the better part of a year now and I don’t think I’ll be switching back to windows anytime soon. Granted that I still have dual boot and Windows 2008 (tweaked to look like vista) installed because it is impossible (at least for me) to completely cut off windows.

Back to the article, the Samsung SCX 4100 and 4200 printers are great residential printers. They are affordable and fairly durable, not to mention really cost effective for printing black and white documents. Most importantly Samsung’s universal Unified Linux driver works great on…well… Linux of course. Anyways I’m not here to sell you a printer, because if you’re reading this you probably already own one.

So after setting up my printer, quite seamlessly with the install wizard, it found the USB printer and printed the test page perfectly. So after the setup I changed a few of the printer preferences such as resolution (300dpi), toner save, and proceeded to close the preferences and continue with my life. A few days later I print some receipt for an online order and when I looked at the paper, it printed of the top left quarter of the page. So it was basically a zoomed/enlarged portion of my receipt, which was useless. I tried the receipt, test pages, even some PDF documents and all of them were zoomed or enlarged. So I reinstalled the printer drivers and it started working fine again. I printed my e-mail and changed the settings and printed a test page just to be sure. The test page showed enlarged again. I quickly clued on to the fact that it was my 300dpi setting. I turned toner save to “Printer Setting” and put it to 600 DPI and then the printer worked fine.

In short, the solution was to keep the printer set to 600 DPI, and the Toner Save to “Printer Settings”. Works like a charm now.

My Printer Settings:

My second problem was when trying to print on legal size paper. The printer option in the printer settings of OpenOffice would not work. Even changing it from the ubuntu menu “System -> Administration -> Printing” it still would not work. I don’t know why but after some tinkering I found a way to switch to legal printer size. You have to open up the CUPS web service which should have been installed by default when you enabled your printer. You can browse to it with this URL http://localhost:631/printers. Then click the Printers tab at the top, and then choose “set printer options” from your SCX4100 printer in the list and you will then be brought to a list where you can set the DPI and Page size. Choose Legal, and then proceed to print your document. You will have to switch back to Letter once you are done printing Legal.

One final comment, if anybody wants me to write a tutorial on how to get their Samsung SCX4100-4200 setup to run under Ubuntu Linux, or perhaps some variant from a fresh install just leave a comment and I’ll gladly attempt to write one.

Enjoy!