So I did some more test printing. This time I did use an evaluation version of turboprint 1.91-2. At least the printer doesn't show the macrobanding, but the overall quality is so bad, that this may not happen with gutenprint as well if I'd care to test gutenprint with such low quality settings.
So I'm not at all impressed with turboprint and I'm not sure yet, whether the macrobanding a hardware problem of my printer or some combination with gutenprint:
- The setup of turboprint is very bad: you can't use arbitary device for printing created using udev; I'm using /dev/printers/foto normally. It reports the remaining ink but doesn't print. Using the ugly /dev/usblp0 (which isn't constant, because I have a second printer), it will print...
- Turboprint's interface to print is nonexistant. Using gutenprint has a problem with the ppd as it seem (can't adjust print size, etc.; but this may be fixed in a newer version). And the help says, that you have to adjust gamma and saturation for printing using gimp, but first the documentation is very old (they're showing gimp 1.2!), second using two printing drivers which may interfere with each other is a bad idea anyway (does gutenprint do dithering if printing to Postscript?). Here I'd like to have a separate printing dialog of turboprint—doesn't need to be a plugin to gimp, which would be even better
- Setting all the parameters to the best in xtpconfig gives a very bad output printing a png from the command line. The dither algorithm doesn't yield a smoth result, and the resolution is very low. The printer does print very fast too, so I doubt that the best possible settings are used (but the turboprint logo is printed!). You can't even setup to use unidirectional printing…
To compare the quality I did a bidirectional print using gutenprint 5.0.0beta3. To my surprise it's equally bad! The dislocation seems to be almost completly in the direction of the head movement. (That means it could be possible to get better quality using turboprint if there were an option to print unidirectional).
One of the question now is, whether the bad quality in bidirectional printing is normal or if this is a hint of a problem of my printer.
