I just installed the turboprint program for a 30 trial. Printing text seems to be without problems. However, printing pictures has serious deficiencies. The printer is a Caon PIXMA MP970. The processor is an AMD 2.4 gigahertz dual core, The operating system is Linux Ubuntu 9.04.
The pictures are made with a Canon Powershot G9 camera with format 3000x4000 pixels. The size of the jpg image varies from about 5 to7 Megabytes.
Problems I encountered with printing these pictures on a Canon PIXMA Mp970 printer are the following:
1. There seems to be no default printer settings that can remain in effect for printing similar pictures, so that a rather involved procedure is required to choose the page setup, printer choice, etc for each picture separately.
2. After Picture Preview is clicked and displayed, there appears to be no way to return to the settings window if any changes are desired. One either prints what is displayed or starts the procedure all over again if a change is warranted.
3. When selecting the borderless print option, the Preview shows the picture without borders. However, the picture is shifted to the left and up in the printed image leaving a 3/16 inch border on the bottom and right sides, while 3/16 in of the image is lost at the top. The paper feed was carefully checked each time, and the shift persisted for all trials. To verify that the printer was not malfunctioning, I printed the same picture from a windows machine on the same printer with a driver furnished for windows by Canon. The picture was printed as instructed, centered, complete, and with no borders.
4. It takes more than 6 minutes to process a single picture for a 4x6 inch print. The computer processor is an AMD 2.4 Gigahertz dual core. The same picture was processed in about 10 seconds on the windows machine with a slower processor, and printing was immediate. Obviously, the long processing time is not acceptable. Is there a fix?
Please let me know if there are fixes to these problems, or whether they are inherent bugs in the driver that remain to be resolved. The non centered print and the long processing times are the most serious.
S. J. Peale.
07/05/09
printing with Canon PIXMA MP970 printer
Hello,
thank you for your feedback!
1. I suggest to create a new printer queue in TurboPrint Control center with your photo printer settings - e.g. 4x6 borderless, modified media & quality settings (you can create several queues with different settings for the same printer). Give the new printer queue a significant name, e.g. "Canon_MP970_4x6_photo".
In your application, simply choose this queue and all settings should be correct.
2. Yes, it would be handy to return to the print settings. With most application programs, there is no way to do this - the preview window is a different application than the program that started the print job. I will investigate this...
3. About the shifted print: this may be application program specific. From which program(s) did you print?
For easy photo printing, we recommend GIMP with our TurboPrint print plugin (menu entry "File"->"TurboPrint...").
In TurboPrint Control Center, you can create new page sizes with additional options: Scanling factor in percent, horizontal / vertical position adjustment settings. However, normally this shouldn't be necessary.
Note: Please don't use the page size "Canon 4x6" - this is a paper with tear-off margins.
4. There is a delay when printing high resolution photos under Ubuntu 9.04. The CUPS printing system in Ubuntu 9.04 does a time consuming conversion from Postscript file format to PDF and back to Postscript - this is not the case in previous versions of Ubuntu. The delay also depends on the application program - we found that printing from GIMP using the TurboPrint print plugin is much quicker than printing from e.g. EyeOfGnome. We are working on a solution to speed up printing.
thank you for your feedback!
1. I suggest to create a new printer queue in TurboPrint Control center with your photo printer settings - e.g. 4x6 borderless, modified media & quality settings (you can create several queues with different settings for the same printer). Give the new printer queue a significant name, e.g. "Canon_MP970_4x6_photo".
In your application, simply choose this queue and all settings should be correct.
2. Yes, it would be handy to return to the print settings. With most application programs, there is no way to do this - the preview window is a different application than the program that started the print job. I will investigate this...
3. About the shifted print: this may be application program specific. From which program(s) did you print?
For easy photo printing, we recommend GIMP with our TurboPrint print plugin (menu entry "File"->"TurboPrint...").
In TurboPrint Control Center, you can create new page sizes with additional options: Scanling factor in percent, horizontal / vertical position adjustment settings. However, normally this shouldn't be necessary.
Note: Please don't use the page size "Canon 4x6" - this is a paper with tear-off margins.
4. There is a delay when printing high resolution photos under Ubuntu 9.04. The CUPS printing system in Ubuntu 9.04 does a time consuming conversion from Postscript file format to PDF and back to Postscript - this is not the case in previous versions of Ubuntu. The delay also depends on the application program - we found that printing from GIMP using the TurboPrint print plugin is much quicker than printing from e.g. EyeOfGnome. We are working on a solution to speed up printing.
Thanks for your prompt reply.
The application I used to print was f-Spot that apparently was bundled with the Unbuntu linux.
By what factor does the GIMP printing reduce the processing time? Does it avoid the ps-pdf-ps conversion? That seems like a convoluted process to print a jpg image. Will printing through GIMP restore the correct picture centering on the paper?
Yeah, I noticed that the Canon-4x6" did not give a paper size of 4x6". A different designation for that option would have avoided the confusion.
Stan Peale
07/06/09
The application I used to print was f-Spot that apparently was bundled with the Unbuntu linux.
By what factor does the GIMP printing reduce the processing time? Does it avoid the ps-pdf-ps conversion? That seems like a convoluted process to print a jpg image. Will printing through GIMP restore the correct picture centering on the paper?
Yeah, I noticed that the Canon-4x6" did not give a paper size of 4x6". A different designation for that option would have avoided the confusion.
Stan Peale
07/06/09
It took some time, but a "release candidate" version of TurboPrint 2.11 is now available for download on
ftp://ftp.zedonet.com/tp2
It fixes performance problems with photo printing under Ubuntu 8.10 / 9.04 (slow processing due to conversion to PDF format in Ubuntu's current version of the cups printing system).
If you download and try this version, please let us know if there are still problems on your Linux installation.
ftp://ftp.zedonet.com/tp2
It fixes performance problems with photo printing under Ubuntu 8.10 / 9.04 (slow processing due to conversion to PDF format in Ubuntu's current version of the cups printing system).
If you download and try this version, please let us know if there are still problems on your Linux installation.
ubuntu 9.04 problems with photo printing.
Thanks for the heads up. I will download the new version of TurboPrint 2.11 tonight and give it a try. I appreciate the fact that the problem was addressed immediately and apparently a fix has been obtained.
S. J. Peale
07/24/09
S. J. Peale
07/24/09
printing with Canon PIXMA MP970 printer
I installed TurboPrint 2.11-1_amd64.deb on my machine running Ubuntu 9.04 with the following results.
1. Picture processing now only takes 30 seconds vs. 6 minutes in the previous version of TurboPrint and vs. about 10 seconds for the Windows driver provided by Cannon.
2. However, the formating statements sent to the printer are garbled. For a 4x6 inch print, nearly all of the paper was fed through the printer untouched, and only a band of about .3 inches received ink at the last extreme.
3. On letter sized paper (8.5 x 11), but specifying a 4x6 print, most of the sheet was passed through the printer untouched, and about 2/3 of the picture was printed before the sheet ran out.
Reducing the processing time made the formatting worse.
I have only until Aug. 2 to make a decision about purchasing the software. If I let this expire, I will no longer be able to test any new verions of the software. I hesitate to buy the software with the current problems unresolved, although TurboPrint is virtually the only option.
S. J. Peale
07/26/09
1. Picture processing now only takes 30 seconds vs. 6 minutes in the previous version of TurboPrint and vs. about 10 seconds for the Windows driver provided by Cannon.
2. However, the formating statements sent to the printer are garbled. For a 4x6 inch print, nearly all of the paper was fed through the printer untouched, and only a band of about .3 inches received ink at the last extreme.
3. On letter sized paper (8.5 x 11), but specifying a 4x6 print, most of the sheet was passed through the printer untouched, and about 2/3 of the picture was printed before the sheet ran out.
Reducing the processing time made the formatting worse.
I have only until Aug. 2 to make a decision about purchasing the software. If I let this expire, I will no longer be able to test any new verions of the software. I hesitate to buy the software with the current problems unresolved, although TurboPrint is virtually the only option.
S. J. Peale
07/26/09
Hello,
thank you for testing!
I've tried to reproduce the problem and made some prints with f-spot on Ubuntu 9.04 and the current TurboPrint 2.11-1.
Printing worked properly if I set the page size in f-spot BEFORE opening the print dialog.
When I changed the page size from the print dialog, print position was wrong - e.g. a 4x6" print was moved down by about 6 inches.
I could reproduce the problem with a gutenprint driver for an Epson Stylus Photo printer, so think this is a problem in f-spot.
Please let me know if setting the page size before opening the print dialog also helps on your system.
thank you for testing!
I've tried to reproduce the problem and made some prints with f-spot on Ubuntu 9.04 and the current TurboPrint 2.11-1.
Printing worked properly if I set the page size in f-spot BEFORE opening the print dialog.
When I changed the page size from the print dialog, print position was wrong - e.g. a 4x6" print was moved down by about 6 inches.
I could reproduce the problem with a gutenprint driver for an Epson Stylus Photo printer, so think this is a problem in f-spot.
Please let me know if setting the page size before opening the print dialog also helps on your system.
Ok, I tried the process of setting the page size in fspot as 4x6 before initiating the print sequence, and the picture printed fine with a border. The choices available for the paper size are limited in fspot, and there is no provision for chosing, say, "borderless 4x6", at least there was no button with this choice. I am not that familiar with f-spot, so there may be a way to customize the paper size by giving the exact dimensions.
The problem seems to be that the page is advanced about 6 inches before printing begins. In another test, I did not choose the paper size until I was in the print setup, where I chose borderless 4x6, but I inserted an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. The paper advanced the nearly six inches and printed the picture on the last extreme of the paper, where there was not quite enough left to print the whole picture. The printer is smart and stops printing when it runs out of paper. That initial paper advance seems to be the whole problem when the paper size is chosen within the print setup. Is there a fix for this?
Thanks for your prompt response.
S. J. Peale
07/27/09
The problem seems to be that the page is advanced about 6 inches before printing begins. In another test, I did not choose the paper size until I was in the print setup, where I chose borderless 4x6, but I inserted an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper. The paper advanced the nearly six inches and printed the picture on the last extreme of the paper, where there was not quite enough left to print the whole picture. The printer is smart and stops printing when it runs out of paper. That initial paper advance seems to be the whole problem when the paper size is chosen within the print setup. Is there a fix for this?
Thanks for your prompt response.
S. J. Peale
07/27/09
In the page setup dialog, choose your printer (instead of the preselected "any printer") and you will get the list of page sizes that are actually supported by this printer - including "4x6 borderless".
The reason for the 6 inch advance seems to be: if the page size is not set to 4x6 before entering the print dialog, f-spot formats the picture as 4x6 inches but sets the page size to 8.5x11 (letter) or 8.2x11.7 (A4). This results in an offset of 5 or 6 inches (because the origin of the PDF / postscript coordinate system is page bottom, not page top).
The reason for the 6 inch advance seems to be: if the page size is not set to 4x6 before entering the print dialog, f-spot formats the picture as 4x6 inches but sets the page size to 8.5x11 (letter) or 8.2x11.7 (A4). This results in an offset of 5 or 6 inches (because the origin of the PDF / postscript coordinate system is page bottom, not page top).