Around 2010, I bought an HP CP1215 for around $150 at a black friday sale. It seemed like a really good deal for a color laser printer, and it worked well enough with Windows. Unfortunately, it didn’t work at all on Linux or Mac OS X, which was kind of annoying. I’d planned on getting rid of it when I moved out to Seattle, but it fit well enough in the back of the U-Haul trailer that I rented, so I tossed it in the back for the ride.

Almost a decade later, it still works, and unfortunately it’s got about the same amount of support that it did in 2010. It turns out that it’s a close sibling to the HP Color LaserJet 2600, which is reasonably well supported by Mac OS X, but the color profile doesn’t quite match, so while I can get black and white from the Mac, I still need the Windows driver for good color.

Similarly, the foo2hp driver supports it, but the color doesn’t quite look right there either.

I thought that I’d found all the quirks, but I was wrong. When I tried to print something in color today, I noticed a striped pattern going throughout the image. A little bit of Googling suggests that this is a known problem dating all the way back to 2013, with the workaround being to print more than one copy and the second one will look fine.

It looks like this printer might also have some problems with printouts starting to fade in color, which is described as a fix here, for which there are instructions on how to fix on this blog post from 2008, but are somewhat time intensive to do.

Sadly, I don’t do enough color printing to justify paying another $150 for a new Brother color laser printer, but at least I can document these things for the next person that has come into possession of one of these printers.