Bastian, I am adding the upstream HPLIP project to this report as this problem is caused by HPLIP itself and not by its integration in the Ubuntu distribution.
To the HPIJS driver developers at HP, the handling of LIDIL printers needs to be improved. Once it should be reall checked whether the best quality and speed of these devices can be reached. Second, the print quality selection must be made easier for the users. The first issue depends on the internals of the driver. There I cannot really give any suggestions how to do it better. For the second issue I suggest the following: Some LIDIL printers are sold with only a three-color CMY cartridge and without black cartridge. Equipped this way they mix black out of the three colors and so the color quality is not so good. A black cartridge can be added optionally to improve the quality. The printer is not able to switch between the modes automatically. The user must select in the driver configuration whether he has only the CMY cartridge or both cartridges. In the PPDs of HPLIP there is a "Quality" option containing all modes for one and two-cartridge use and the "PrintoutMode" option only assigns one-cartridge modes to the standard tasks, so that the printer "just prints" for all users. This makes many users complaining about bad quality and the problem is caused by using only the color cartridge when the black one is mounted, too. My suggestion is the following: Add a new option "Black Cartridge" wih the settings "Installed" and "Not Installed" to the PPD, into the group "Installable Options" (or whatever its standard name in the PPD specs is). Let the Quality options have settings for the different resolutions and for color or grayscale printing but not distinguished one- and two- cartridge modes. Now let the "PenSet" part of the "-sIjsParams" Ghostscript command line option come from the "Black Cartridge" option of the PPD and the rest from the "Quality" option of the PPD. The "PrintoutMode" option is only coupled to the "Quality" option, as before. Now the user selects his cartridge configuration once when he sets up the print queue. Several printer setup tools even pop-up the options of the "Installable Options" group so that the user selects the printer's hardware configuration. Then he always prints in the correct modes to make use of the cartridges installed in the printer. As a next step the default setting of the "Black Cartridge" option should be set to "Installed" for all printers which are sold with both cartridges and "Not Installed" for printers which are sold with only one cartridge. -- Improvements for LIDIL printers urgently needed https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/214234 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
