Epson Stylus printers (in general, Gimp printing)

[rlk at alum.mit.edu (Robert L Krawitz)]

Does anyone else have an Epson Stylus Photo 700/EX printer (the
original Photo should also work, but the newer ones won't)?

I've been holed up in my basement for a good part of the past 4 months
or so working on a driver (actually, enhancing the Gimp's print
plugin) for this printer.  I have a few testers, but it's gotten to
the point of being good enough (IMNSHO) so that I'd like to get it
broader testing exposure.

It requires the Gimp version 1.1.13 (probably older 1.1 versions will
work, but it's known that 1.0 doesn't).  The source is available on
http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/print-3.0.1.tar.gz if anyone would like
to give it a try.

(My wife allowed, upon seeing one of our wedding photos printed out
yesterday, that it's possible that all the time I've put into it may
actually be wrth it.)

If you want to try it, I recommend starting with settings in the
general range of:

Brightness 120
Gamma 1.2
Saturation 1.3
Density 1.2
Green & blue slightly less than 100 (close to 100 if you use Epson
inks; more like blue 89-93 and green 95-97 for the third party inks
I've tried).

It certainly isn't perfect -- the dithering algorithm is basically a
slightly modified error diffusion, and the soft weaving isn't ideal --
but if you have one of these printers, you may want to give this a
try.

I've made other generic improvements (16-bit rather than 8-bit color,
and additional controls in particular) that should help other printers
too, but I don't have any other Epson or HP printers to test this on.

-- 
Robert Krawitz <rlk at alum.mit.edu>      http://www.tiac.net/users/rlk/

Tall Clubs International  --  http://www.tall.org/ or 1-888-IM-TALL-2
Member of the League for Programming Freedom -- mail lpf at uunet.uu.net

"Linux doesn't dictate how I work, I dictate how Linux works."
--Eric Crampton




-
Subcription/unsubscription/info requests: send e-mail with
"subscribe", "unsubscribe", or "info" on the first line of the
message body to discuss-request at blu.org (Subject line is ignored).