Re: [hpoj-devel] new I/O driver coming soon (second try)

[Robert G. B. <rg...@ph...>]

On Thu, 1 Mar 2001, Erik Hendrix wrote:

> I have a OfficeJet G55 and currently I'm using the cpdj500 filter. Which
> gives bad quality compared to what my printer can do.
>
> Now I understand one can use the 970 but having looked at it, there are a
> lot of steps there to do without clear English instructions.
>
> It would be nice if we would be able to just get a filter or so and put
> it on the system instead of having to go out, getting Ghostscript and the
> driver and then compiling, making changes etc...

Hear, hear!  I definitely second this.  I've spent a full ink cartridge
pair and $20-30 worth of high-quality paper on this over three months
and still get most unsatisfactory (nowhere near "photo-quality")
results.  I've gone through cpdj500 (with various gamma settings, color
settings, and any other tunings I can figure out) and have even tried
the new gimp printer driver, as it was rumored that this provides a
ghostscript-independent device layer that can be carefully tuned for
gamma and so forth, but neither of these come close to either the
quality of the printer used as a color photocopier or the onscreen
quality of the underlying jpeg (or etc.)  photographs, even at pixel
resolutions that should be 1:1 mappings of the onscreen image.

Stippled images produced by some driver setups have annoying granularity
and a lack of sharp images and still poor color, bitmap images produced
by other drivers have better pixel granularity (although still nothing
like I imagine I should be getting) but even worse color.  The colormap
problems aren't ones that can be resolved by monkeying with linear
three-knob gamma -- I've turned those knobs pretty much every way they
can turn and still get poor blue/whites, overemphasized reds and greens,
and a consequently "muddy" image.  They require a proper nonlinear map.

Although I haven't taken the relatively drastic step of hooking the
printer up to my one dual boot laptop and actually checking out the
Windows photo-print resolution, I cannot imagine anyone buying the
printer and attaching it to any linux box for the primary purpose of
printing color photographs or images with the best I've achieved so far.
Since they continue to sell, I imagine that the Windows drivers and
gamma settings are pretuned for much better output.  It would be truly
nice if HP would help create a linux filter set that has a "perfect"
colormap/pixelmap conversion for this kind of printer.  I'd actually
suggest that they go with the gimp plugin approach, as this seems a lot
more portable than the yet-another-ghostscript-filter approach.

It is great to have a good printer/kernel interface so that both
scanning and printing "work" and to reduce the number and complexity of
the driver modules that must be inserted, but at this point the burning
need is clearly for improved color print quality.  It would be nice for
HP to both contribute the colormappings they must already have developed
for e.g. WinXX (the core of which should be portable/reusable code,
after all) and fund the several thousand pages of test printing required
to build and fine-tune a gimp plugin or other portable filter package,
possibly on a printer by printer basis for their various officejets
(presuming that some might require different maps).

A proper job of this should mean that they can eventually ship a
build-ready package with their officejet (and probably other) printers
and add the word "Linux" to the list of supported environments right
their on the printer boxes.  This will make them money for sure -- HP
has an excellent reputation and the G55's and other color combo office
printer/scanners/copiers are a great solution for many a University
research group or small business department that relies on linux,
including my own.  Until this is fixed, though, there is no way I'm
going to buy another one -- I'm even considering buying one of their
inexpensive competitors (e.g. a Canon) just because their print
drivers/filters are known to exist and work excellently well on
photographs.

(Sorry about the semi-rant, but this is a moderately serious problem and
HP needs to become aware of it and direct some resources to it -- I
cannot even recommend their printer/scanner to most of my friends at
this point on the basis of the quality I've been able to achieve with
20-40 hours of my own time invested.  This is in the "not ready for
linux prime time" category and very definitely is costing them sales.)

   rgb

-- 
Robert G. Brown	                       http://www.phy.duke.edu/~rgb/
Duke University Dept. of Physics, Box 90305
Durham, N.C. 27708-0305
Phone: 1-919-660-2567  Fax: 919-660-2525     email:rg...@ph...