Re: Canon printer minor quibble
On Mon 26 Sep 2016 at 23:50:39 +0900, Mark Fletcher wrote:
> 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 know nothing about Windows 7 or VMs, although I believe the latter
allows an OS to be run in just the same way it would on bare metal.
How the data from Windows gets to CUPS isn't, I think, important,
although with the Stretch box the network would be involved. My
understanding is that the data coming from Windows has already been
processed by Windows, so therein lies one difference between the file
arriving at the CUPS server from Windows and that from Jessie.
The Jessie file will be sent as-is to be filtered and rendered by CUPS.
The Windows file could very well just pass through CUPS and go directly
to the printer. Only an error_log would reveal what is happening.
The colour abnormality could be simply be because the Canon driver is
rubbish at colour management or it needs adjusting. There is a driver in
printer-driver-gutenprint which is for your printer; I'd suggest testing
that with the printer. It comes with the cups-calibrate program.
--
Brian.
Reply to: