Comment 17 for bug 120016

Hi, I can confirm a strange behaviour of Gutenprint drivers with Canon inkjet printers. Under Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic Koala) my new PIXMA iP4300 prints text and b/w images very well and the print test page is perfect, but when I print color images (from GIMP or gThumb) I can see two different behaviours:

- setting the printer to CMYK color model, as suggested in the previous post, leads to an almost-grayscale image. Colors are so desaturated to be almost unnoticeable.
- setting the printer to RGB color model (the default) gives a very, very dark image, where colors are just a little more present than in the previous case.

KCMY color model behaves exactly like CMYK. CMY behaves almost like RGB, just a little more color and a little less dark.
I am printing using the "Canon PIXMA iP4300 - CUPS+Gutenprint v5.2.4" driver as installed automatically by Ubuntu 9.10. Resolution set both at 300x300 and at 600x600 DPI (same results), all other options at default values.

It looks like this is a known Gutenprint problem, as the symptoms (very dark image) are also reported into this thread on an Apple user forum:

http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1330890
(didn't know that Apple used Gutenprint, too!)

I will now try the Canon official driver, to see if it performs any better.