Distro Reviews Printer support 9037

Chris Wilkinson

I'm sorry to say that the "rating scale" is complete bollocks. I have two printers in the house, an HP LaserJet 4P and a HP LaserJet 6L. This site rates both printers at 4 which in theory means they work "perfectly" with Linux.

Linux may be able to "send output" to the printer but the print quality is completely *inferior* by any measure of the term. I could show the output to anyone beyond the 6th grade and they would agree that the print quality is noticably inferior with Linux-CUPS.

The test.... I went to maps.google.com and entered my address. It brought up a map of the street where I live and the surrounding area. There is a 'print' link near the top-right of the page. Click on it and print.

I rebooted to WinXP and printed the page on both the 4P and 6L. I then booted back to Linux (SuSE 10.0) and printed the exact same page using the exact same steps. The "quality" of the output is absolutely pathetic in Linux. Sorry COLA guys but it's the truth. Try it yourself before you flame me for this.

FYI - SuSE reports the printer configuration as:

PPD file: HP LaserJet 4P Foomatic-hpijs (recommended) (manufacturer-PPDS-hplip-HP-LaserJet4P-hpijs.ppd.gz)

CUPS version 1.1.23-21.2

What's the difference:

1 - Detail. The Linux print out labeled 5 of the main roads around my house. The Windows version labeled 30-40 roads. (Same monitor resolution both times and browser was maximized.)

2 - Resolution. The windows print out looks like a 600dpi output. The Linux-CUPS looks like it's somewhere around 150 dpi.

3 - Greyscale. Different printers differ in their ability to output pure-clean grey scale output. Some printers for example look great at 70% grey-scale but might not look so great at 60%. The background for "Google maps" is a light grey. (I'd say somewhere around 20% grey-scale.) The Windows driver selected a grey-scale that looks great. The light grey is very smooth, uniform and simply looks great. The grey-scale that Linux-CUPS selected looks "blotchy" by comparison.

4 - Contrast. The background is "light grey." The streets are white. On Linux-CUPS I can barely see the white streets on the light-grey background. The map is difficult to read. (Think dark car at night.) The Windows output is extremely easy to read. Each of the white streets has a very fine black line along the outside edge of all the streets. This is non-existent on the Linux-Cups print-out.

5 - Colors. The output is all B&W but there's a lake and some streams by my house that show up nice an dark on the Windows output. On Linux-cups these are barely darker than the background and very, very grainy looking. The larger-main roads on Windows were printed in a slightly darker color than the side-streets. With Linux-CUPS the main roads are slightly darker but barely enough to tell the difference and the color is nearly identical to the light-grey background.

So for two (2) printers that are supposedly "perfectly supported" the output simply looks *inferior* compared to XP using the exact same page printed from the exact same web-site. BTW... these are both HP LaserJet printers that happen to be one of the most popular printers ever made. They are widely used throughout the business world. I would have expected the output to be much closer to what XP produced but it's really isn't close.