Lexmark Optra E does not print greyscale with hpijs driver

[Rolf Leggewie]

http://www.openprinting.org/printer/Lexmark/Lexmark-Optra_E

On an up-to-date lucid system, the Lexmark Optra E laser printer does not print greyscale with the recommended hpijs-pcl5e driver. I also tried the latest version from above URL and the result is still the same. The gutenprint driver does support greyscale but does not correctly work with tray selection when an external paper cassette is used.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

I followed https://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingPrintingProblems for "Capturing print job data", but there are actually 5 files starting with d. Plus, it seems that ~/printout is not a location relevant to my system.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

I identified the file in question via the job number, please see the attachment. When I look at it with evince, the greyscale is visible, but the printer prints only lineart/bw.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Can you switch the driver of your print queue to the printer model HP LaserJet 3390 with hpcups? To do so, start system-config-printer, right-click the icon for your printer, in the menu click "Properties" and in the dialog click the "Change" button for make and model. Choose "HP LaserJet 3390" and under the drivers choose the entry with hpcups. Does this give grayscaled printing on your printer?

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

Till, thank you very much for having a look. Unfortunately, the suggested change does not result in greyscale output, either. After selecting "HP Laserjet 3390", I was presented with three options, two for gutenprint, one for hpijs (not hpcups). I chose the latter. Let me know if you want me to attach any of the PPD files I was using.

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Does it print grayscale with

- Generic PCL-5c printer, hpijs-pcl5c
- Generic PCL-5e printer, ljet4d
- Generic PCL-6/XL printer, pxlmono

Do these drivers actually work? Do they give a good print quality? Do they print the pages with a reasonable speed?

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

I shall test that later.

Here's something surprising that I found out earlier today. Evince will produce very poor output, greyscale, but everything very coarse grain, even with the gutenprint driver. The only acceptable result is from Acrobat Reader printing with the Gutenprint driver. Frankly, I'm really surprised by the large variation in the results.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

Here are the results

Gutenprint (reference): works, good grey, an estimated ~30 seconds for the first page

hpijs-pcl5c: works, coarse grey, a little over two minutes to print the first page
ljet4d: works, good grey, 90 seconds for the first page
pxlmono: does not work, prints the print instructions/code

I would say the quality of the output of ljet4d is even better than from the Gutenprint driver.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

Till, what is the next step? You still have this ticket set to "incomplete" and eventually it will expire.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for cups (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

and expire it did, which should not have happened

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

This is unfortunately, still the same in precise

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

Updated the OpenPrinting web site and foomatic-db upstream, also uploaded a new foomatic-db package to Vivid.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package foomatic-db - 20150415-0ubuntu1

---------------
foomatic-db (20150415-0ubuntu1) vivid; urgency=medium

  * New upstream release
    - Lexmark Optra E/E+: Use ljet4 instead of HPIJS as recommended driver,
      this improves the grayscale quality on these printers (LP: #978506).
    - Support for new printers from Sharp.
 -- Till Kamppeter <email address hidden> Wed, 15 Apr 2015 20:38:03 -0300

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

Switching to a clearly inferior driver can't really be seen as a solution to this bug. Reopening.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

One of the regressions of making this the default driver for Optra E is that the tray selection mechanism no longer works. Unfortunately, I think it's also broken in the Gutenprint driver.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

I believe the best default driver for this printer is the Gutenprint driver. the only thing that needs work is apparently the tray selection mechanism.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

another thing that is more appropriate in the Gutenprint than the HPLIP driver is the settings of the media limits. Gutenprint driver is quicker. The relevant percentages data on the openprinting.org page is totally wrong. Till, do you know how I could correct that?

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package foomatic-db - 20160212-0ubuntu1

---------------
foomatic-db (20160212-0ubuntu1) xenial; urgency=medium

  * New upstream release
     - Support for new printers from Lexmark, Samsung, Ricoh and OEM.

 -- Till Kamppeter <email address hidden> Wed, 17 Feb 2016 18:16:03 -0200