Thu, 10 Nov 2005
Playing with Epson printer
We have an Epson Stylus Photo 2100 printer (7 inks, A3 width, roll-paper feed, paper cut-off, etc.), and I occasionally try to print a photo on it. The problem is that I usually forget which settings I've used before. This time I have decided to move this printer to my office in order to explore further its capabilities and create an informal how-to document for it.
Firstly my prints had shifted colors, as if the driver had wrong idea about which ink is in which slot (the printer has black, gray, cyan, light cyan, magenta, light magenta, and yellow inks). I have figured out that this happens in gimp-print when using 720x720 dpi resolution. When I changed my settings to 1440x1440 dpi, the problem disappeared.
Another problem was that when printing on a roll paper the printer leaves first 2cm of paper blank, which wastes this part of paper. And I was not able to make the paper cut-off working yet.
The next problem is the printer's user interface: I usually have problem to put the paper in - it probably depends on the printer driver settings, but it sometimes requires the paper to be fed to the printer through the hole for the roll paper, and the next time it demands the other input hole (for the stack of paper sheets) to be used. I have to test it further.
Anyway, here are few links for Epson 2100 software:
- Epson/Avasys download page - they have a native driver for Linux (even as RPM), but it probably contains some proprietary parts (it runs as a separate daemon and CUPS has to send the data through it). I was not able to compile it on AMD64 architecture because of data size mismatch.
- gimp-print - included in Fedora in version 4.2, but the new version - 5.0 beta - is said to be much better for 2100. It is not even in Fedora devel (rawhide). I will try to compile it tomorrow. They say that Epson 2100 is fully supported, and that the output is even better than the native drivers for The Other Operating System provide.
- Libinklevel - a library and an utility for querying the amount of ink remaining in the printer's cartridges. Works for 2100 as well, but has misnamed the cartridge colors. I have contacted the author of this package, and I will probably create RPMs for it.
I will do more tests tomorrow and hopefully I will get even the paper cut-off and other features working.