> > Does anyone here have experience using colour printers with Linux? I
Yes, but only for printing photos. To print the odd office document in colour, anything will do. Cheap inkjets are what you pay for them - throw-away heads and cheap mechanics, etc, suit yourself. Photo printers are generally made better, and have 6 inks, not 4. HP has beaten their [56789]00DeskJet series to death for over a decade and they're not really in the run. They also fold the paper 180deg when it goes through, which precludes heavy photo papers. Epson and Canon are dishing it out at the high end photo market. Canon provides no Linux support whatever. The Epson 2000/2100 printers (with pigment ink) are probably the best available, starting at $2k. (I've heard once "Epson is top, Canon is playing catchup, and just forget about HP", which is probably not totally true about the Cannon). Note, high end photo range here. Running costs of these printers are exorbitant, but still much cheaper for enlargements, considering the totally ludicrous prices for those in this country. One step lower are the dye-based ink printers, around $1k. The prints are not as colourfast and don't last as long. I got an Epson 890 (the A3 model is the 1290), which costs $600 and is probably the best value/quality for money currently. Printing to these kind of printers always goes through ghostscript, one way or another, gs module stp, which is the same as gimp-print. It says the Epson range is supported best, it's options look very good. Unfortunately my experience with gs-stp is rather bad (gs 6.53, SuSE 8.0). Colours on the print are not realistic. Skin tones are useless, i.e. no printing of people. On the "Epson photo quality inkjet paper" (an absolutely marvellous paper, cheap and very bright white) and the corresponding setting in the driver, ink was just squirted on, which wasn't only a waste of expensive ink but also rendered the printout useless because puddles of ink formed before drying. It would require having the printer and heaps of ink and all papers as well as time to calibrate the RIP (raster image processor, the guts of software), and I'd guess that open source doesn't have the resources. One would have to have a seriout think about technology as well. As an alternative, buy turboprint (www.turboprint.de, 25EUR), which has the calibration already done and integrates nicely into cups (as a printer model, so you can still select for each printout whether you want to use gs-stp or turboprint). All photos so far printed just fine, but I haven't yet done anything approaching exhaustive testing. Compared with the cost of wasted ink, 25EUR is cheap, about one ink cartridge worth. This however with SuSE 8.1 and gs 7.05. Turboprint still needs gs, it's not a postscript interpreter. My experience with the film scanner is similar. I just stuck any slide into the scanner, and tried for over half an hour with xsane to get something approaching useful, but no, it's overall too dark and the highlights are always significantly washed out. That's just all rubbish. vuescan costs US$40, but produced a very good scan of the same slide with one click and zero adjustments. I'm all for open source, but the job needs to get done first. Alternatively, it's trying the supplied mickeydrivers under win4lin, vmware, wine, etc. Photo & Video (in Merivale mall) and Fuji Image Plaza (church corner) both have equipment where you can stick a CD into, push some touchscreen buttons, and get a file printed on the usual photographic paper, for the price of reprints from negatives. This allows prints from slides for the same price (otherwise unaffordable). Cost is $1.20 for 9*13 or 10*15, and $12 for A4. The A4 makes inkjets look very interesting, the small sizes do not. See the Nov consumer magazine for a test of this kind of job. Consumer about mid year had a test of inkjet printers <$1000. With the exception of the Epson 890 and some Canon, they were all basically junk for printing photos. Getting your film scanned at various shops is either not cost effective (i.e. starting $10 per frame) or of too-low quality to be an interesting option. See http://volker.dnsalias.net/foto/film-on-cd-cmp.html Do let us know how you get on. Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is possibly list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
