LaserJet 5 print quality

Alex Zepeda usenet at blarf.homeip.net
Thu Sep 15 14:29:15 PDT 2005


I've recently acquired a LaserJet 5 for light printing duty.  For text,
the printer works quite well with Cups.  Unfortunately much of what I
print will be scanned in copies of text (thank most of these
academic journal archivers for avoiding OCR).

When it comes to images I seem to have two choices:  extremely slow, or
low quality.  I've tried the following drivers with the following results:

CUPS 'LaserJet Series PCL6': quite slow (5-10 minutes per page depending
on how big it is), but the quality is fantastic.

GIMP-Print 4.2.7 LaserJet 5 Series: fast, but the graphics are not good.
I've tried both the Adaptive Hybrid and Floyd-Steinberg dithering
algorithms with little success.

Foomatic LaserJet5/lj4dith: tolerable quality, seemingly reasonable
speed but it will inform the printer that I want A4 paper for every job.

Foomatic LaserJet5/lj5gray: lousy quality, tolerable speed

Foomatic hpijs driver: the worst quality of all the drivers, a bit slower
than GIMP-Print.

The easiest test is the color wheel on the CUPS test page.  However, I've
taken a mostly light colored image off of hamncheez.com (yeah, it's quite
tasteless, be careful) and gotten more dramatic results.

Is there a driver out there that will handle graphics at a tolerable speed
(< 1ppm is hardly tolerable), and with reasonable quality?

-- 
alex




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