Reverse Engineering the Samsung ML-2010 laser printer

Ingrid recently bought a Samsung ML-2010 laser printer. The price was attractive, and it seems to be a good printer. However, there is either the choice of a an open-source driver for a different printer model, one which doesn't support the 1200x600DPI mode, or a closed-source driver which comes on the included CDROM.

I'm going to try to reverse engineer the new format, which is called "SPL II" in the GUI and "QPDL" in the generated file (@PJL ENTER LANGUAGE = QPDL). My approach is to print a postscript file using the binary driver, saving the result to a local file. At no time do I plan to disassemble the binary software provided by Samsung.

To begin with I am going to put my braincells to work on testpage.spd2.gz which is the result of printing testpage.ps.gz. (Note that the files have been manually compressed with gzip)

Another file (emptypage.spd2.gz) was produced by printing an empty page (echo | llpr -Plp1).

I'm describing what I've discovered on another page.

Entry first conceived on 10 December 2005, 0:06 UTC, last modified on 15 January 2012, 3:46 UTC
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