[Gimp-print-devel] Recommendations for fast, high quality printer?

[Charles Briscoe-S. <cp...@de...>]

Hi,

I'm deciding on a printer to buy to use with gimp-print, and would like
to know if anyone here has any suggestions.  Our priorities are print
quality and speed; we want to use this printer to produce prints as near
as possible to photo-quality, on demand, for customers, so it has to be
pretty quick.

To give you an idea of where I'm coming from, I'd been investigating
some continuous-tone printers, the Fuji NC/NX and pictrography printers,
the Oki DP-5000 and the Alps MD-5000.  The NC/NX look quite good, but
the interface docs are under NDA.  Same goes for the pictrography, IIRC,
but the printer's rather bulky and is not at all cheep.  The Alps/Oki
"microdry" looked good, but is also stubbornly proprietary and I recently
read that it takes 27 minutes to print an A4 picture.

So I seem to keep coming back to inkjets as being the only viable
solution... ;)

Anyway, to come the point...  I've tried gimp-print 3.1.2 with an
Epson Stylus Photo 700 borrowed from a friend and was pretty impressed
with the results.  A few months ago, I tried to write an ESC/P2 driver
myself, starting with ppmquant and adding ESC/P2 output and tweaking as
best I could.  I managed to get output that was a bit better than with
ghostscript, but still far worse than the windows drivers (which is why
I then went off to consider continuous-tone printers).  I also hadn't
been able to find any Epson documentation later then december 1997,
so didn't know how to get 1440dpi working.

Now, gimp-print seems to support 1440dpi, variable dot sizes, and 6 colour
printing... which should create good enough prints for our purposes.
I'm now considering getting a Stylus Photo 870, which I hear gives output
as good as the Photo 750 but does it a good bit faster.

Does anyone here have a Stylus Photo 870?  Is it any good?  Does
gimp-print drive it OK?  If you've tried printing a full A4 or A5 photo,
how long does it take?

Even if gimp-print doesn't take full advantage of the SP 870, if it
drives it reasonably well I'll probably get one anyway and then see if
I can help improve gimp-print.

Thanks for any help,

--=20
Charles Briscoe-Smith             <URL:http://www.debian.org/%7Ecpbs/>
PGP2:  1024/B35EE811  74 68 AB 2E 1C 60 22 94  B8 21 2D 01 DE 66 13 E2