> dishing it out at the high end photo market. Canon provides no Linux > support whatever. The Epson 2000/2100 printers (with pigment ink) are
Canon don't release any programming specs. Epson do, but don't directly provide linux support. However, Epson drivers are ahead of Canon ones as a result. The support for Canon is improving; some printers have all the resolutions supported, but six colour support is still missing. > 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. You do not need to go through ghostscript when using gimp-print. Gimp-print does provide a gs-stp plugin, but surprisingly this may get dropped in the future. Most distros are going towards Cups as the printing support, which has its own postscript-to-raster part and then uses gimp-print (or other) just to convert the raster to printer commands. Cups has other raster-generation programs, e.g. it can convert a gif to a raster, and therefore avoid postscript altogether. If it's photos you're after, then printing directly from gimp is the best way. The gimp print plugin uses the gimp-print library directly, again avoiding any postscript in the middle. > 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. Colours became a lot more realistic with the release of gimp-print 4.2 (latest release is 4.2.4). I am generally very happy with the colours I see. I agree with the photo quality inkjet paper being great. It also gives very similar colours to the photo glossy paper (but not the premium glossy paper), which is useful for checking colours. The heavyweight matt paper is a good paper too, but a different kettle of fish again. I have done calibration of inks and papers. It doesn't take too long when you know your way around the source code. Although I have never used my printer with windows for comparison, the gimp-print team have had messages back with comments like "the best output from gimp-print is slightly better than the best output from windows". > My experience with the film scanner is similar. I just stuck any slide My scanner isn't supported by sane, so the only option I have is vuescan. It would be nice if source code to that was available, but the guy does updates often, and replies to e-mail promptly, so I'm not too unhappy. - Mark PS: Any chance of borrowing that Epson 890 at some stage? I know that the dither algorithm I developed in gimp-print doesn't work well with 6 colour printers. But as I only have a four colour printer, I haven't had much impetus to fix it!
