While printing has somewhat taken a back seat to the use of PDFs and other electronic forms of communication, there are still plenty of times when printers are regularly used; however, along with this there may be times when your printers will not behave correctly and refuse to print. Sometimes you might get an error specifying a problem with your printer setup, but at other times the print job may sit in your print queue and not move.
If this happens to you, then there are several approaches you can take to troubleshoot your printer setup, including removing and re-adding your printers, and delving into configuration files on your Mac; however, unless you have specific need to preserve your exact printing setup, then these approaches are often far more effort than they are worth.
Because of this, a far quicker approach for managing printer problems is to reset the print system on your Mac, and then optionally reset the printer. Doing this will, in essence, set your printer configuration to factory-defaults, which is a good starting point for getting your printers working again. It is also perhaps one of the easiest troubleshooting steps to take in OS X, even though a full “reset” sounds like something that should be a last-resort approach:
- Go to the Printers & Scanners system preferences (perhaps called Print & Scan, or Print & Fax).
- Click the lock to authenticate.
- Right-click (or control-click) the list of printers along the left-hand side.
- Choose the Reset Print System option that shows (it will be the only one in the contextual menu).
- Confirm you wish to reset your print system
Once authenticated, right-click the printer list to access the option for resetting the print system.
The next step would be to consult your printer’s manual to fully reset it, if you suspect the printer’s settings might be cause for the problem at hand. This usually requires you hold a combination of its buttons in a specific sequence, or press a little hidden button on the device somewhere.
After doing this, you can re-attach your printers and scanners, or use the plus button at the bottom of the printer list to add them back. If your printers required you run special setup utilities from your printer’s manufacturer, then download the latest setup utility or driver package from the manufacturer’s Web site and run them to add your printers back.
Whenever a client has a printing problem, my first advice is to turn off the printer, then unplug its power cord. Power it back up and try. Many modern printers don’t turn off 100% from the switch.
As an owner of the same Brother HL-2270DW I was particularly interested in this article. I’ve yet to successfully get my printer to work wirelessly but that’s another story.
With Mavericks 10.9.5 I did not see a lock icon in Printers and Scanners to authenticate but was able to do the reset.
Having followed your reset suggestions I have a question: do I still need to reinstall the already existing and current Brother software (CUPS driver, Wireless Setup Wizard and Firmware Update Tool)? They’re still to be found in a Brother Utilities folder in Applications.
In my opinion:
Firmware Update Tool, probably not, because if you already updated the firmware of your printer there is absolutely no reason it would revert back when resetting something on your Mac.
Wireless Setup Wizard…. you do say that you haven’t been able to get the printer to work wirelessly. Now that you reset the printing system on your Mac, it’s worth trying it again.
Regarding the CUPS driver, I’m not sure. I don’t see why reseting the print system would uninstall that particular driver. And it is possible that a system update installed a version even newer than the one that came with the printer. On the other hand, I guess that the installer you have would only replace the driver if it’s newer than the one already installed. I think your best bet is to download the latest driver directly from the manufacturer:
http://support.brother.com/g/s/id/os/macintosh.html
A lot of photographers who use the Epson Stylus Pro R3880 printer have had trouble with Yosemite, mostly lack of control of the size of print image. New printer drivers did not help much. Disabling the check paper size at the printer did help.
Personally I found Mavericks to have more issues with my USB-attached HP printer than I did with any other previous OS (going back to Leopard). Then again, I didn’t have any issues with those OSs.
Thanks a million trillion! This solved the problem – after a couple of hours of intensely trying to get somewhere and not getting anywhere with an Epson printer following an upgrade to El Capitan. Bless you!
I used my Epson R3380 printer on a PC for years, and I have just switched to a new iMac. Following some of the suggestions above, I was finally able to get the printer to recognize Fine Art paper, but now it won’t switch to Matte Black ink. The printer used to automatically switch inks when I selected Velvet Fine Art. The Matte Black choice is even grayed out. I have disconnected the power source, reset the print system, upgraded the drivers, disabled the check paper size, and everything else you have suggested. My printer is connected via USB. Is there something else I can try?
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