My father bought a Canon PIXMA MP600 all-in-one printer. Unfortunately he didn’t consult me first as he has a PC with Ubuntu Hardy provided by me. I would never had let him by anything from Canon. Linux support for their devices has been next to nonexistent in the past. Fortunately there’s a (little) change in the situation as Canon is now providing proprietary linux drivers. They have both rpm and deb packages for most of their drivers, but the download sites don’t always list them even if they are available. Sadly Google does alot better job for finding the drivers from Canon’s site.
Anyway my father had a problem. He could not take colored prints as the colors were horribly misaligned. I investigated the problem just to notice that others had problems with color printing, too, and I was almost ready to give up (after a long long search and many tender thoughts on Canon). Then I just had an idea; let’s try using lower resolution. I lowered the print resolution from 600×600 dpi to 300×300 dpi and voilà the colored print came out just like it should!
I quickly updated the OpenPrinting database entry of the printer and decided to blog about this in hope that others who are giving some rough love with head to their desks can also benefit from this information.
God, I hate proprietary drivers. And Canon.
