After nearly seven months without a printer, I’m happy to say that we are once again able to print documents from our computers.

I took receipt of an Epson Stylus Photo R800 on Saturday, but had to wait until today to purchase a USB A-B cable. Printers aren’t supplied with cables any more, it seems. I ordered the printer on-line and it arrived just in time on Saturday for the shops to be closing. It can also be connected over Firewire, but I decided to hook it up over USB instead.

I looked at a bunch of printers before deciding on this one. I considered the Epson R245 and the R320, which were attractive because of their support for memory cards. Using those, you can stick your Compact Flash card straight into the printer, view your photos on a small LCD screen and print from there. It’s a gimmick, albeit a nice one.

Higher-end printers don’t have such features, because the thought is that serious photographers would never print straight from the card, anyway. Most serious photographers (of which I am not one) take their photos in RAW format (which is not actually a standard and means something different on every make of camera), post-process them in something like PhotoShop, and only then send them to the printer.

Of course, I don’t need to spend €1000 on a printer, but I did want something a little bit better than can be had for €100. Photo print quality was important, but equally important was support for Linux. For this reason, I had to rule out the Canon IP5000 that Fenella suggested. Canons are very poorly supported in Linux.

I also looked at an HP Photosmart 8250, but read too much conflicting information about the quality of its prints. I also didn’t want to have to fart around with yet another system of printer drivers. Berkeley LPR, LPRng, System V printing, CUPS, Omni, Foomatic… I’ve had enough of making UNIX systems print properly over the years. Printing isn’t exciting; it isn’t sexy; it isn’t even interesting. It just needs to work.

And so it ended up being the R800, a decently priced printer with high quality photo prints. Eight separate UltraChrome ink cartridges take care of that, although one of those is actually a gloss optimiser cartridge that avoids bronzing on glossy paper.

Its top resolution is 5760×1440 dpi with a 1.5 picolitre droplet size, but I shudder to think how long it takes to churn out a photo at that resolution. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised, though. So far, all I’ve printed out was a test page.

I researched the Linux support for this printer extensively before deciding to purchase it. Although the printer’s been around since 2004, Linux support for it is quite new. Epson apparently has some sort of driver for it, but I wanted to use CUPS, which is as close to a decent printing system as UNIX has ever had. Actually, it is decent, if a little difficult to recall the details.

gimp-print 4.2.7, which is on my Fedora Core 4 system, doesn’t support this printer, so I had to download and compile gutenprint 5.0.0-rc2. gutenprint is actually gimp-print, with its name changed to remove the understandable confusion that some people had in thinking that one could only use this package to print from The Gimp.

Anyway, once this bleeding-edge copy of gutenprint had been installed, with all of its PPD files, I was able to configure a printer queue for the R800, using CUPS’ rather nice Web interface. A test page rolled out shortly afterwards.

And, just to show that Linux does — after a little bit of work — support this printer well, here’s an example of how the escputil utility (part of gutenprint) can be used to read the ink levels of the cartridges:

escputil -i -r /dev/usb/lp0

Escputil version 5.0.0-rc2, Copyright (C) 2000-2003 Robert Krawitz

Escputil comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type 'escputil -l'

This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it

under certain conditions; type 'escputil -l' for details.

Ink color       Percent remaining

Yellow                     100

Magenta                     100

Cyan                     100

Matte Black                     100

Photo Black                     100

Red                     100

Blue                     100

Gloss Optimizer                     100

Handy, eh?

Anyway, no longer will I have to bike over to Jo‘s house when I want to print an important document. Thanks for that, Jo. You’re free of me now!