Photo Printing Quality Problems

[handyman]

I cannot get good quality photo prints from my Canon iP3000 printer using GIMP, Digikam or Krita in Linux. (Currently Kubuntu 9.04) I believe it is a driver issue as text printing is fine and all the printer options, eg. double sided printing etc. work fine, it just gives really crappy results when printing photos. Printing photos in Windows XP with the Canon driver yields excellent results using Canon's Easy Print software or Photoshop. Can anyone suggest a fix for this? I have tried all the setup adjustments I can find, thru several versions of Kubuntu back to Gutsy Gibbon, to no avail. It is a bit of a pain to have to keep switching operating systems whenever I want to print a photo.

[lmilano]

Re: Photo Printing Quality Problems

Talking about the driver, could you please be more specific?. When you hit Print in Digikam, you get a Print Window where you can configure the printing settings. There is an easy configuration path where you just choose the Print Quality, and all the low level settings are adjusted for you (ppi, etc). Do you see a Photo Quality option?

[handyman]

Re: Photo Printing Quality Problems

Yes there is a print quality option, the choices are; automatic, 3000 dpi and 600 dpi. The results are the same with automatic and 600 dpi. I have not bothered with 300 dpi. Compared to printing from windows programs the pics are washed out, lacking in brilliance, muddy and grainy. These settings are also available from; System>Administration>Printing>Printer>Properties> Printer Options , and I have tried all that might have an effect on printer output quality aside from manually setting specific individual settings for brightness, contrast, saturation, and individual colour densities.

[lmilano]

Re: Photo Printing Quality Problems

What driver are you using? Apparently this printer works perfectly with the one for Canon BJC-7000
http://www.linuxprinting.org/show_pr...n-PIXMA_iP3000

Hope this helps!

[handyman]

Re: Photo Printing Quality Problems

I'm using the driver included in the jaunty distribution. I believe it is the Gutenprint recommended driver. I have tried various recommended drivers with earlier ubuntu releases to no avail. As I said the printer works well for both text and graphics, just does not give acceptable photo quality output.

[monte48lowes]

Re: Photo Printing Quality Problems

DISCLAIMER: I own an HP printer. I do not have the Canon printer to test.

I did find a drive on the Canon Japan website. It can be downloaded from here: ftp://download.canon.jp/pub/driver/bj/linux/.

I then installed it onto my system as follows:

wget [url]ftp://download.canon.jp/pub/driver/bj/linux/bjfilter-pixusip3100-lprng-2.50-2.i386.rpm[/url]

sudo apt-get install alien

sudo alien --to-deb --scripts bjfilter-pixusip3100-lprng-2.50-2.i386.rpm

sudo dpkg -i bjfilter-pixusip3100-lprng_2.50-3_i386.deb

Let us know it this works.

Mike

[ukchucktown]

Re: Photo Printing Quality Problems

I can offer a suggestion as I have used the software with great success to calibrate my monitor with a cheap Huey colorimeter. It's called Argyll CMS (in the repositories, package name argyll). Maybe it's a calibration issue and not a driver issue. I'm no expert but thought I'd give you another option to consider. Argyll is pretty complicated stuff. I don't fully understand it all myself. It also doesn't have a GUI. It's all command-line.

I followed a tutorial then delved into the man pages to figure out how to create an ICC profile. The results are stellar on my monitors. I got my NEC and laptop LCD to sync on color which is hard to do. It took Argyll an hour to generate each profile but it rocks. It can also handle printer profiling but I've never used it for that purpose.

[handyman]

Re: Photo Printing Quality Problems

Thanks for the suggestions guys, it is much appreciated. I downloaded the canon driver as suggested by monte48lowes and installed it as a new printer. (At least I think I did.) The result is no change. When I reinstalled the driver, the driver list only shows a driver labeled CUPS+Gutenprint v5.2.3 Is this the canon driver I downloaded? If not where and how do I find/install it? I issued the command "sudo dpkg -i " on the deb file from my home directory, would this have anything to do with it?