There appears to be a compatibility issue with Mac OSX lion and lots of printers.   (Talked about here on the apple support pages)  The printer may or may not work properly, but you will get an error that says “The optical photoconductor needs to be replaced.” If you see this error it may be that your drum needs replacing, but it could also be a communication problem with the printer.

When I try to print on my new Fuji Xerox document C4350 last week I got an error saying “The optical photoconductor needs to be replaced.” and the printer would not even print.  If you play around with a different print setting (e.g. USB, Jetdirect, LPD, IPP) you may be able to get the printer working (still with the error!) till Apple repairs the problem. Here’s how I got my Xerox printer working.

How to get a Fuji Xerox Printer working with OSX Lion

I just purchased a Fuji Xerox Docuprint C4350, and there have been a couple of issues getting it running.

1. Installing the Drivers

The 1st issue is that the Fuji Xerox drivers from the website do not run under Lion, they are PPC code which means you need to have a PowerPC computer or Rosetta to run the installer. The actual PPD files are fine however, so the workaround is to install the drivers onto an older computer (I used my old G4 Powerbook) and then copy them via thumb drive or e-mail onto your new computer.

In my case the file was called “FX DocuPrint C4350 PS.”  The Installer puts it into the Library/Printers folder and you need to move it anywhere on your Lion machine then when you are selecting the driver  choose ‘Other’ and find the file.

2. “The optical photoconductor needs to be replaced.” ERROR

After setting up the IP address on the printer and then selecting the computer to print using IPP printing, whenever I tried to print I would get the error “The optical photoconductor needs to be replaced.” Not only this –  it would pause the printer queue and not print the page! A little Google search shows that this is a common error under Lion.

In my case I found 2 other ways to get the printer working.
The 1st was simply to plug it in by USB instead of Ethernet printing. This gave me no errors at all and the printing works fine, it’s just a bit slower.

The 2nd way was to still use IP printing but select HP Jetdirect – Socket instead of IPP printing. Xerox calls it port 9100 instead of JetDirect so make sure on your Xerox printer you enable port 9100. This still gives the error, but the printer at least prints the page normally.