[Openicc] Epson HTM CUPS drivers

[edmund ronald]

If you use Epson drivers in vendor matching mode on Mac you get the
benefit of being able to bypass the profiling complxities, making
excellent prints from Photoshop from Adobe RGB or sRGB; it is really
good push-button quality. Their black and white auto mode is also
superb. For consumer printing Epson have nailed it.

However, I think Gutenprint is pretty competitive with the native
drivers ***when printing profiled*** on matte paper where I did my
checking with my own 3880 settings; this is an early experimental
driver, different from the one Robert released. I showed my prints
around a bit to some guys who do color and print professionally, to
make sure I wasn't biased :) My profiles were made with a DTP70 and
Monaco Platinum, but I have no doubt that Argyll and any current
spectro will work well. I haven't tried the glossy stuff yet.

There are people who use Gutenprint to do profiled printing on 44"
printers. The stability of Gutenprint across platforms and upgrades is
a persuasive argument for print shops, as is the unfailing support for
obsolescing devices.

Image dimensions don't line up precisely between the two drivers
though, which is annoying for the pros and needs fixing. Epson's
drivers have had issues too though - remember the A4 centering bug?

I'm sure users would be well served by a port of the Epson drivers.
However, as far as I can see Gutenprint is now quite competitive if
you have the ability to tune it, and a future version should bring
this quality to most users via canned media settings and profiles.
Epson hardware is now very stable, so canned profiles port well across
different machine samples.

Edmund

On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 2:49 AM, Chris Murphy <lists at colorremedies.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Feb 7, 2011, at 6:41 PM, Robert Krawitz wrote:
>
>> On Mon, 7 Feb 2011 18:30:22 -0700, Chris Murphy wrote:
>>> Has anyone looked into wrapping Epson's existing HTM (half-tone
>>> module) for their pro printers for Linux/CUPS? Maybe this is a
>>> licensing issue for Linux that just can't be bridged. But without
>>> asking, maybe no one knows the answer to this.
>>
>> That's surely closed source, with all the attendant problems (binary
>> dependencies, 32 vs. 64 bit, non-x86 architectures, you name it).
>
> I will bet it's 32bit and 64bit x86, and 32bit PPC only. And it is no doubt closed source. It's a black box. RGB or CMYK go in one end, and ESC/P comes out the other. So it would be a different project than Gutenprint maybe. It could still be freeware, even if that HTM black box is not open sourced. The time to market would be faster. And the profiles already available would then work on Linux.
>
> I just received an email from a friend and it appears the cost of the HTMs is free even for commercial products, but yes very closed and lots of agreements to sign. So that is not compatible, probably, with an open source solution if the idea is that it must be 100% open, rather than 90% open except for this little black box that gets us ESC/P. Maybe it would have to be a separate shareware project to make it worth someone's effort.
>
>
> Chris Murphy
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