Canon printer minor quibble

[Mark Fletcher <mark27q1@gmail.com>]

Finally getting around to raising an issue I have faced for years and 
never made much inroads into...

I have a Canon iX6530 A4 / A3 inkjet printer purchased in Japan. It is 
connected via a USB cable to my Jessie PC. I have the Canon 
iX6500-series driver installed. It seems to work fine.

I have shared the printer via CUPS and, sometime back, also fannied 
around with AirPrint in a way I don't completely remember as well as 
fannying around with samba print sharing in the apparently mistaken 
belief that these were needed to share the printer with Windows.

I am successfully able to print to the printer from the Jessie box it is 
connected to, and also from my iOS devices of various stripes and ages, 
Windows 7 VMs running on the Jessie machine, a stretch box also on my 
network -- in short, anything I try to.

The issue is that, when I print a photo natively from Jessie, the 
colours come out rather dark and the overall resulting picture isn't 
very good. Photos in particular suffer for this but I even notice it 
with coloured text -- for example printing a PDF with a table where a 
cell is shaded in green, it comes out of the printer looking nearer to 
black. It's green, but it's very, very dark.

On the other hand, when I print the same images from the Windows VMs, 
they come out great. Colours are better balanced and the photos look 
much better. The above-mentioned PDF table cell comes out looking green 
not black.

Keep in mind the only route to this printer is through the USB cable 
attached to the Jessie box. I don't know how data from the Windows 
machines is getting to CUPS, exactly (Windows sees a network printer but 
I don't know which of the redundant setups I did is serving it) but once 
it gets there everything from that point, most notably the printer 
driver, is the same.

I can just print from Windows when I want a good quality outcome, but it 
doesn't sit well with me that Windows is doing something better than 
Jessie, so I want to fix it. Any idea what I should be looking at?

Thanks

Mark