Hoary: printing with Epson Stylus Photo R200 a mess

[Keith Richie]

On 4/15/05, Ubu Roi <ravachol at home.nl> wrote:
> >From previous experience under Fedora Core 3 with the gimp-print-2.4.7
> drivers I know that they are not optimal: printing photo's on A4 always
> produces a thin white stripe on the left and it is difficult to
> remove borders on top and bottom so the whole A4 page is covered.
> 
> However something seems to be wrong under Hoary.
> 
> Firstly I tried printing the test page:
>  The 1st attempt produced a page with lined borders, the word 'ubuntu'
>  in large letters on top next to the symbol in red/orange and then 8
>  'color bars' with color graduations and text like 'Grayscale', etc
>  on the left. But there were all kinds of 'stripes' and some of the
>  bars were incomplete and the colors 'faded' toward the bottom.
>  The 2nd attempt gave a page with the dark gray stripes from the
>  word 'ubuntu' missing, no lines at the borders and no text to the
>  left of the color bars.
>  The 3d attempt produced a page without the word 'ubuntu', no
>  border lines, no text to the left of the color bars and further
>  aberrations in the color bars themselves.
> 
> Secondly I tried printing a photo on plain paper (A4).
> The result was bad. Faded colors on the left halve, normal colors
> on the right side. And 'splotchy'.
> Comparable results on a second try.
> 
> This never happened with the gimp-print-2.4.7 drivers under FC3.
> 
> Anybody else using an Epson Stylus Photo R200/R300 under Hoary.
> What are your experiences.
> 
> Ubu
> 
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> 

I have several of these printers. But I too never had any luck with
the default Gimp Print driver installed with Hoary.

There's basically 2 great choices, compile a newer Gimp Print
5.0.0.b3, or use the non-free Turbo Print driver.

Gimp Print 5.0.0.b3 works great, and fully supports printing on CD/DVD media.

I also had horrible results with the default gimp print driver for an
Epson Photo 825, and Photo 960. But once I upgraded these machines to
the newer Gimp Print results were also great.

There is still a bug (?) in the new Gimp Print drivers, in that,
borderless printing still isn't borderless.

The Turbo Print driver offers wonderfull quality, 99% of the features
are supported, and easy installation, but it's non-free, you need to
pay for it.