Using NEC SuperScript 610 (+) printer with Windows XP

Problem: NEC refused to supply XP printer drivers for its SuperScript 610 & 660 printers.

Solution: The Windows 98 drivers were written for NEC by Destiny Technology who also supplied drivers to Minolta (for the 1100L) and Panasonic (for the KX-P6x00 series).
The 1100L is a 600 dpi printer whereas the NEC 610 is only 300 dpi. This results in text being printed at twice the correct height using the 1100L driver (it’s also shifted sideways!).
Panasonic’s KX-P6100 is a 300 dpi model so I tried its XP driver. This is a universal driver for the KX-P6100, the KX-P6300 (600 dpi) & KX-P6500 (600 dpi). It worked very well.

Instructions:
1 Download the Panasonic KX-P6x00 driver for XP (P6X00XP.EXE) from http://panasonic.co.jp/pcc/products... to a temporary folder.
2 It is a self extracting file, double click P6X00XP.EXE and extract it to that same folder.
3 Read the readme.txt file produced - it has important information about the LPT port etc.
4 Double click the setup.exe file.
5 Go through the setup ensuring you set dpi to 300 and the printer to KX-P6100.
6 This installs all 3 Panasonic printers (!), so two need deleting.

Result: The driver appears to print perfectly with 3 small quirks. The text is about 3mm to the right of the correct position, there is no ‘photoenhanced’ option for print quality and I was unable to persuade it to print a text box border from Word (this may be a Word issue).

Networked printer: I had the added difficulty that my NEC 610+ was attached not to my XP computer but to a networked machine running Windows 98SE. Setting the printer to shared in 98SE made it visible on the XP machine where I set its driver to Panasonic KX-P6100. This allowed me to print via the 98SE computer to the NEC. The KX-P6100 printer was unnecessary on the XP computer so could also be deleted once its drivers had been purloined for use with the networked NEC 610.

NEC SuperScript 660: If the dpi is set to 600 and the printer to KX-P6300 at step 5 above this driver may work equally well for the NEC SuperScript 660. As I don’t have one I haven’t tried it.

Windows NT and 2K: The same Panasonic website also has drivers for these operating systems.

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