epson printers on amd64

[Warren Block]

On Sun, 20 Nov 2011, perryh at pluto.rain.com wrote:

> Warren Block <wblock at wonkity.com> wrote:
>> On Sat, 19 Nov 2011, David Southwell wrote:
>>> Anyone up to date on how to do high quality printing with
>>> epson inkjet printers (in my case r2400 and r2880) on amd64
>>> systems.  print/pips* reports they require 386 and do not
>>> compile on amd64.
>>
>> print/gimp-gutenprint works pretty well from Gimp, although
>> I have not figured out how to get consistent color and brightness.
>> It supports both of those printers.
>
> I'm sure I'm not alone in doubting that _any_ ink-spitter is likely to
> produce "high quality printing" or "consistent color and brightness",
> regardless of the host support used.  Those printers are designed to
> be manufactured as inexpensively as possible so as to be sold at very
> low prices, the profit being in the recurring ink sales.  "Cheap" and
> "high quality" tend to be incompatible design goals.

(Sorry, I hadn't realized I was replying on -emulation, which is meant 
for computer emulation.  CCed to -questions on this reply.)

Quality color photos are the one area where inkjets really can do a good 
job.  Experimenting with cheap Epson R200 and R280 has shown that they 
can print better quality photos than local photo printing places.

Color and brightness are consistent until I print a different photo. 
Gutenprint saves the settings, it's just that they don't work 
the same with different photos.  Possibly this is due to my changing the 
wrong adjustments.

Oh, and I've only used Gutenprint on 32-bit systems so far.