On Mon, 9 Dec 2002, Helmut Walle wrote: > On Wed, 4 Dec 2002, Helmut Walle wrote: > > Once I get a colour printer, I will report further... ...
All right, I got an Epson C61. The decision was based on these points: - Availability of a well-developed Linux driver, i.e. here gimp-print 4.2.4 - Affordable initial price and running cost (well...) - Good photo quality (just good, not outstandingly excellent :-) ) - Parallel port required for old PC First experience: - _Before_ I installed the ink cartridges in the _new_ printer, there was already a small amount of (not dried) black ink on the printhead assembly. Does the factory test print every printer? Hum. - After installation of the cartridges, I printed a test pattern using the escputil Epson utility that is part of gimp-print. escputil allows to read the ink levels from the printer, to perform a nozzle clean, and to do other ESC/P stuff. The _new_ printer had lots of blocked nozzles and did not print well at all. Following the instructions, I ran a nozzle clean, and then it worked perfectly. The nozzle clean consumed 6 % of the black ink, and 2 % of each of the colours. - I generated a first photo test as follows. I assembled four one megapixel photos into one JPEG using montage, then loaded the resulting file into GIMP, and then created a binary for the C61 using 1440 dpi highest quality, four-colour, Inkjet paper (I have Kodak Inkjet paper). It took gimp-print about two hours on my Pentium 120 MHz to create the 100 MB large file. Upon completion of this, it took another half hour to print it. Of course, one could also print it directly while the dithering is done - then it would possibly only take a little bit longer than two hours altogether. - 96 MB RAM is a bit low for assembling A4-sized 300 dpi photos, since the montage process takes up to about 130 MB. Does anyone here have some 64 MB 72-pin SIMMs for sale? FPM or EDO would do. - Printing quality is very good. However, colours are not as brilliant as on screen, and colours are too red. With a magnifying glass, the speckle pattern resulting from the dithering can be seen clearly, particularly in the brighter areas of the photo. The photo I chose, admittedly, was a difficult one, ranging from large areas that are almost black to other large areas which are almost fully white. There is absolutely no banding to be seen, not even through the magnifying glass. - Ink consumption per one A4 page with four photos, each of them 8 cm x 10 cm, seems to be about 2 % black, and 2 % for each of the colours. Using original Epson cartridges, this would result in ink cost of some 2.6 $ per page. I had expected that this would be considerably higher than the "ink $ per page" data given by Epson, because the numbers they provide are based on only 5 % colour covering for each colour. Comments: - If you have a faster machine, all the processing will be quicker. The printing itself, however, will then be limited by the printer mechanics / inertia. In the high quality modes, the print head passes over the same areas a number of times and builds up the image in several passes. This is time-consuming, but if you want high quality photos, it is unavoidable with this printer design. - gimp-print offers a very wide range of paper and quality options for many printers. Epson is well-covered. However, Epson itself does not publicly support Linux. HP does -> hp.sourceforge.net - Sorry, I can not compare to Windows with the same printer, because I do not have M$ products. - After printing several different photos, I found the following settings to be good for me (on Kodak Inkjet Paper): Brightness 1.15, Contrast 0.9, Magenta 0.93, Yellow 0.96 - all others unchanged. Now let's see where to get decent ink to refill, and figure out how to circumvent this chip-on-cartridge trick... Software comments: - gimp-print 4.2.4 builds and installs without problems. - AFPL Ghostscript 7.04 puts some object files into the wrong directory. But after manually moving them to the right place, it compiles all right with --with-ijs set. - I still have to configure IJS. Cheers, Helmut. +----------------+ | Helmut Walle | | [EMAIL PROTECTED] | +----------------+
