Success! I got my recently purchased Epson ME 1+ (sold in China only) working with my Mac. It was made for Windows only, and Epson doesn’t have a Mac driver for it. Thankfully there are people who play around with Linux and make free software. So if you’re in China and bought the cheapest Epson printer you could find, here’s what you need to do:
- Go to this page and download Foomatic-RIP and Ghostscript.
- While they’re downloading, go to this page and download usbtb.
- Install Foomatic-RIP and Ghostscript first. Administrator privilege needed.
- Then with your printer on and plugged to your Mac, install usbtb.
- Let usbtb detect the printer and try to find a driver for it. It’ll fail.
- Manually choose the Epson C46 driver. Ignore usbtb’s warning and proceed.
And that’s it! You now have a slow, craptastic printer that you wish would break so that you’d have an excuse to get a better one. You’re welcome!
Originally got the tip from here.
Can’t download usbtb, failed to open the download page, do you has any other option? TKS
Here Simon: http://dkwan.com/files/daniel/usbtb-1.0.15.uni.dmg.
Hi DK, Thanks for your tips on the ME 1+, I also stumbled into buying this craptastic printer for my mac and was about to go buy another new printer… But, your blog came to the rescue! Worked like a charm.
Great! Glad it helped.
Hi DK, also bought this Epson ME 1+ in Beijing. I tried what you wrote, but the usbtb woudn’t install - something about a postflight script? Is there another version of the software I can use instead?
Thanks,
Gerard
Sorry Gerard, I have no idea.
I’m in China wondering what a decent price to pay for this printer is. I’ve been quoted 350 RMB, does that sound about right? Is the printer any good?
When I got it, all the places were selling it for about 499 RMB, so 350 is probably good. This is an extremely slow printer.