PCLWhydoIcare?

October 22, 2006 9:46 AM

When I am setting up printers on my Windows 2003 server, HP provides a PCL5e and PCL6 driver. What is the difference, and why do I care?

Obviously one is the 5th revision of PCL, and one is the 6th, but they provide both.... Does it matter? Should I stick with 5? Or upgrade them all to PCL6?

posted by SirStan to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Wikipedia has a nice article on PCL5e and 6.

PCL6 is different, different commands are sent to the printer, new compressions are used, but it should be backwards compatible.

I ran a 2003 print server with 40+ printers on it, always installed with the PCL 6 driver, and never had an issue until I needed to print through samba on RH 6 (yes, 6) and I don't think PCL5e would help in that situation :)

Another useful page.

GL,

Matt
posted by mattdini at 11:28 AM on October 22, 2006

Thanks Matt. I read around a little. PCL5e is the same as PLC6 standard, and since HP doesnt really say what the differences are, in some cases the drivers could be identical..

Awesome.
posted by SirStan at 4:37 PM on October 22, 2006

Amongst differences you don't care about, PCL6 often supports better compression and thus prints faster.
posted by Mwongozi at 5:20 PM on October 22, 2006

It is possible that the end users may have documents/programs which call specific features based on the driver installed. I recently put together a print server in Fresno, and the users had an automated document template which only worked correctly with a 9 year old driver for a laserjet 5Si.

In the last several months, I've installed Windows 2003 servers and built Active Directory print queues in 133 offices across the country, and the one consistent thing I can say is that no standard (pcl5, 6 or PostScript) was adequate for every situation.

Driivers off the HP site provided significantly different functionality than the ones which ship with Server 2k3, too.
posted by FYKshun at 6:18 PM on October 22, 2006

PCL6 will print PCL5e jobs but in my experience the conversion doesn't handle duplexing very well. There is no benift for PCL5e unless a specific application requires it so go with 6.
posted by Mitheral at 8:36 PM on October 22, 2006