So, since color laser printers are rather cheap, now, I figured it was the right time to chuck my ancient HP LaserJet 5 and cheap HP DeskJet 5150 printers.  I picked up an HP Color LaserJet 2600n printer, since it had decent reviews, a JetDirect card built-in, and sported a rather standard 600x600 DPI [unenhanced] resolution.

Linuxprinting said that it works mostly, and that print quality is rather crappy compared to the Windows drivers.  Indeed they were right.

I installed foo2zjs [20060625dfsg-4] on my print server (Debian testing), and configured cups to use it.  The driver defaults to monochrome, but after selecting color, photos and random vector graphics (even printing C code from VIM) looked terribly washed-out and grainy.  I didn't have a problem with the grainy look, since it is only 600x600 DPI, and most inkjet printers use some sort of RET to produce a much higher effective resolution.

Ok, maybe my printer is shot, or maybe the Linuxprinting folks are right, or a combination of the two.  I installed the HP driver in my VMwared Windows XP system, and did a test print of a photos.  Big difference - it looked really nice, and correct.

I then tried the suggestion to use km2430_2.icm for the color profile, no noticeable difference.

Figuring there was something wrong with foo2zjs, I pulled down the 20061224-3 [unstable] version of the Debian package, but dpkg whined that it depended on a newer version of libc6, so I didn't continue.

After heading over to the author's homepage, I noticed some big red text:

*** DON'T USE the foo2zjs package from Ubuntu, SUSE, Mandrake/Manrivia, Debian, RedHat, Gentoo, MacOSX, or BSD!
*** Download it here and follow the directions below.

Umm, ok, so I dpkg -P'ed foo2zjs, followed the instructions, and built it manually.  By default, the install target uses a prefix of /usr instead of /usr/local, but they provide an uninstall target.  I printed a photo again, and it did look better, but not up to the same level of quality that the XP driver produced.  Anyway, here are some photos of printouts of this photo (click for full-size):

That's Debian testing's foo2zjs.

That's the author's foo2zjs.

And that's the XP driver.

I still think something's wrong.  Is it maybe just lack of RET on the author's foo2zjs driver that accounts for the delta between the XP driver's output and Linux's?  Anyhow, the printer is still nice.  Saves me power and desk space, if nothing else!

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