Konica-Minolta BizHub 4700P Firmware Crashes

[gskibum]

I recently converted a network of Windows systems to macOS, and have run into some trouble with printing certain PDF files from Adobe Acrobat DC to Konica-Minolta BizHub 4700P USB printers.

Mac workstations are macOS Mojave 10.14.5 and Adobe Acrobat DC 2019.012.20034.

The copy machine vendor has been useless, so I am trying my luck here.

What happens is that "certain" PDF documents, when printed to the 4700P printer send the printer into a Firmware Error [900.43] status. It is necessary to reboot the printer.

Of course "Print as Image" will solve the problem, but that is a band-aid that causes pain with large documents.

The sample PDF I have is a B&W, 3-page document created with Microsoft Word for Office 365. No security settings are applied nor are there any signatures. It's just a 3-page, B&W document created with Microsoft Word.

I wanted to start with updating the firmware, but since the copy machine vendor is unresponsive I have not had any luck with that. I cannot find a download for the firmware anywhere on the Konica-Minolta web site.

I have about 25 of these printers, and yesterday I had an opportunity to do some testing with two of them. One of the printers printed the document successfully, while the other did not. The one that successfully printed this document does choke with some other documents.

The status sheet prints on these two printers say, respectively:

Firmware engine is "FDN.PIR.E514-0" and "FDN.PIR.E618-0".

Loader "LW41.PR2.P454-0" and "LW50.PR2.P544D".

Kernel FW41.CY.F454-0" and "FW5.CY.F544-0.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

[Dov Isaacs · Accepted solution]

The Konica-Minolta bizhub 4700p is an office printer that provides emulation support for both PCL6 and PostScript 3. In other words, the “PostScript” support in this printer is not Adobe PostScript 3. It is not licensed from Adobe (it is a CloneScript emulation of PostScript developed years ago by Imagen which was bought out by QMS which in turn was bought out by Minolta which in turn merged with Konica over the years) and obviously we cannot support you from Adobe via our OEM connections for that reason.

You might try downloading a new driver from Konica-Minolta (although based on the their website, you are supposed to use the standard support provided by Apple in MacOS to drive the printer).

Regardless of the PostScript generated by a driver or Acrobat, you should never see what is effectively a printer crash (we are not talking about a PostScript error here!). Fixing such crashes generally requires new printer firmware from the manufacturer. You should contact Konica-Minolta support and be insistent on a fix from them.

Sorry, but that is all we can do to assist you.

          - Dov