After nearly seven months without a printer, I’m happy to say that we are once again able to print documents from our computers.<\/p>\n\n
I took receipt of an Epson Stylus Photo R800<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n\n I looked at a bunch of printers before deciding on this one. I considered the Epson R245<\/a> and the R320<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n\n 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<\/strong> 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<\/a>, and only then send them to the printer.<\/p>\n\n 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<\/a> that Fenella suggested. Canons are very poorly supported in Linux.<\/p>\n\n I also looked at an HP Photosmart 8250<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n\n And so it ended up being the R800<\/a>, a decently priced printer with high quality photo prints. Eight separate UltraChrome<\/a> ink cartridges take care of that, although one of those is actually a gloss optimiser cartridge that avoids bronzing on glossy paper.<\/p>\n\n 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.<\/p>\n\n I researched the Linux support for this printer extensively before deciding to purchase it. Although the printer’s been around since 2004, Linux support<\/a> for it is quite new. Epson apparently has some sort of driver<\/a> for it, but I wanted to use CUPS<\/a>, which is as close to a decent printing system as UNIX has ever had. Actually, it is<\/strong> decent, if a little difficult to recall the details.<\/p>\n\n 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<\/a> is<\/strong> 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<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n 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>. A test page rolled out shortly afterwards.<\/p>\n\n 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:<\/p>\n\n Escputil version 5.0.0-rc2, Copyright (C) 2000-2003 Robert Krawitz<\/p>\n\n Escputil comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY; for details type 'escputil -l'<\/p>\n\n This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it<\/p>\n\n under certain conditions; type 'escputil -l' for details.<\/p>\n\n Ink color Percent remaining<\/p>\n\n Yellow 100<\/p>\n\n Magenta 100<\/p>\n\n Cyan 100<\/p>\n\n Matte Black 100<\/p>\n\n Photo Black 100<\/p>\n\n Red 100<\/p>\n\n Blue 100<\/p>\n\n Gloss Optimizer 100<\/p>\n\n <\/pre><\/p>\n\n Handy, eh?<\/p>\n\n Anyway, no longer will I have to bike over to Jo<\/a>‘s house when I want to print an important document. Thanks for that, Jo. You’re free of me now!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 … Continue reading <\/p>\n\n
escputil -i -r \/dev\/usb\/lp0<\/h1>\n\n