Poor printer quality coming from Mac

Having used Canon printers for many years, both on Windows and Mac, I am amused by the misleading comments that are made on these forums, such as Barney-15E's 'guess'.

If installed and configured correctly, the Canon driver will not be causing your quality issue. There will be something with the way in which you have the driver settings configured that is causing your quality issue, such as paper selection or color profile.

That's assuming you are using a Canon driver. There is every chance that you are using a Gutenprint driver, since you mention that you have the printer connected via a network.

It would help if you can confirm which model of Canon printer you have, which driver you are using (the Kind section in the Print & Fax view will show this) and how the printer is actually configured on the network.

PaHu

I am having a similar problem. I have been printing with a PC and an HP color laserjet 2605 without problems. I hooked it up to a new MacBook and now the print quality is poor (washed out, etc). I tried to install the HP driver that is online (I assume the most recent) but nothing seems to change. I'm not sure how to force OS X to take the newest driver. We actually have a new iMac that is doing the same thing. Thoughts?

You say the Canon printer is hooked up to the network - does this mean it is connected to the PC and you are sharing it via Windows printer sharing or is it connected directly to the network? There's a difference. If the computer is being shared by the PC you might want to try reversing the direction: connecting it to the Mac and sharing it to the PC.

LHTMN wrote:
I originally had a PC with a Canon printer

Which model printer? Inkjet, laser, multifunction device?

that is hooked up to a network.

How is the printer hooked to the network? Shared from the Windows machine, direct Ethernet connection, wireless connection?

What printer drivers are being used? Canon drivers or 3rd-party drivers?

With my new MacBook, I can use the printer fine but the quality of the print is horrible compared to how my PC would print the same document.

I suspect that you have the printer connected to a Windows machine and shared over the network, and that the Windows machine is using Canon drivers but the Mac is not.

I primarily print documents from Microsoft Office for Mac or iWork. In general, everything printed from my mac turns out blotchy and unclear whereas my PC prints beautifully. Does anyone know why this is and/or how I can fix it so my Mac will print as clear as my PC?

By 'blotchy and unclear' do you mean that pix are fuzzy or that text is jagged or both?

Barney-15E wrote:
My guess would be poor quality driver from canon. Apple doesn't make the drivers; they just bundle the drivers with the os. See if canon has an updated driver

unlikely. If it was an HP device, then maybe yes, but Canon devices are usually better behaved.

wayupnth45 wrote:
I am having a similar problem. I have been printing with a PC and an HP color laserjet 2605 without problems. I hooked it up to a new MacBook and now the print quality is poor (washed out, etc). I tried to install the HP driver that is online (I assume the most recent) but nothing seems to change. I'm not sure how to force OS X to take the newest driver. We actually have a new iMac that is doing the same thing. Thoughts?

Have a look at the drivers at <http://openprinting.org/show printer.cgi?recnum=HP-Color_LaserJet2605> and ensure that your system is properly set up. The CLJ2605 is supposed to be a PostScript device and should work correctly out of the box unless HP has screwed up the drivers even worse than they normally do.

Although I consider myself pretty good with computers, the openprinting website (Linux, I think) means nothing to me. I can tell you that the printer works fine but the output is poor. This is distinctly different from the output I got on a PC just a few days ago. A test page looks fine but any document/photo printed looks terrible. Must be some driver issue. Just don't know how to fix.

I'm not sure how to force OS X to take the newest driver.

Delete the current printer in the *Printer & Fax* control panel, then click on the plus button to add a new printer. It should automatically select the newest driver. What I find odd is that I have one of these printers at work - the 2605dn - and I notice no difference between the output from Windows and output from the Mac. Is yours connected directly to the network or is it connected to the PC and being shared?

wayupnth45 wrote:
Although I consider myself pretty good with computers, the openprinting website (Linux, I think) means nothing to me. I can tell you that the printer works fine but the output is poor. This is distinctly different from the output I got on a PC just a few days ago. A test page looks fine but any document/photo printed looks terrible. Must be some driver issue. Just don't know how to fix.

When you say that the test page is good but actual documents are not, that indicates that there is indeed a driver issue. In laser printers the test page is usually stored in the printer's ROM, and is generated on request, so print quality is usually as good as the printer can achieve. Documents must be sent to the printer, so the quality can vary. Reasons for document quality issues include driver issues and setup issues (incorrect paper settings, incorrect printer feature settings, etc.)

Which driver are you using? You should be using the drivers from HP, which apparently have been updated as of 2 Jan 2008. <http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareIndex.jsp?lang=en&cc= us&prodNameId=1140730&prodTypeId=18972&prodSeriesId=1140727&swLang=8&taskId=135& swEnvOID=219> The drivers on the HPIJS page should also work; the HPIJS drivers are mostly created by HP engineers but aren't distributed by HP for reasons which make sense to HP, even though it's been my experience that HPIJS drivers work better than the ones HP does distribute. (There are several reasons why I no longer use HP printers; this is one.) In particular, you should be using the PPD for that printer. I'd check /Library/Printers/PPDs/Contents/Resources on your system and look for 'HP Color LaserJet 2605.gz'; it should have a modify date of 5 Aug 2008 if you have a Mac with OS X 10.5.6 and all the current Apple patches and the HP printer updates. There should also be a folder named '2600Series' inside /Library/Printers/hp/laserjet. That folder should have a modify date of 13 Sept 2008 (or whenever it was that the last HP patch was applied) and a size of 11.4 MB.

If you have something that's not at least close to the above, delete 'em and reinstall the HP drivers and all HP patches. And think seriously about using the HPIJS drivers.

Hello All.

I have this exact same problem, and I have never found a solution.

I have a Canon MP510 printer. It is shared by a Windows XP machine. When I print from any Windows computer then (of course) everything works fine. The sharename for the printer is “CanonMP510”, no spaces or funny characters.

If I print from a Mac then 1) If I am printing just black text everything is fine, 2) If I print anything that contains colours, then the colours are wrong, graphics are broken up and spread over the page, it’s just an unusable mess.

I connect to the printer from my Mac by going to System Preferences/Print & Fax. Click on the + button, select the Windows icon at the top, select workgroup then machine name, select guest access, then I can select the shared printer. The problem now is that my printer driver does not appear in the drop down list, only generic Gutenprint drivers and even then only for an MP500 and not the MP510 that I have).

I have downloaded and installed the driver for this printer, but I simply cannot access them from this screen. If I connect the printer directly to the Mac the correct drivers are used.

The nearest “driver” I can find and select is Canon PIXMA MP500-CUPS+Gutenprint v5.1.98.2 – and I’m sure this is the reason that the colour printing fails so badly. However, I don’t want to connect it to my Mac permanently, things are organised around having that printer (which is also a scanner) connected to a dedicated Windows PC.

Any ideas form anyone will be most appreciated. I have to say it is has frustrated me beyond belief. This is one of times when Apple’s slogan “it just works” isn’t true.

Thanks in advance

Your problem is simple. The Canon drivers do not support standard network connections. This means that it expects to be connected either by the USB cable or using the (optional) Bluetooth connection. The GutenPrint drivers seem to work better with text than graphics, which is not a surprise given that the MP510 does not seem to be listed among the supported devices at <http://gimp-print.sourceforge.net/MacOSX.php>. You're lucky that the MP500 drivers work as well as they do, they are not meant for use with a MP510.

The solution to your problem is equally simple:

1 replace the Canon with a device which is supported or which has proper network drivers so that it can be shared.

2 get the (optional) Bluetooth connector for the Canon, assuming that the Canon is within 10 meters (30 feet) of the Mac and that the Bluetooth system works with OS X. I'd check with Canon before spending any more money on that system, but that's me.

3 connect the device to the Mac and see what happens when you share it from the Mac. I suspect that the Windows machine will have problems printing. I'd check with Canon.

Pick one. I'd go with (1), myself; there are a fairly large number of network-capable MFDs which cost less than the MP510. Because they have a network card (and sometimes a wireless card as well) built in, you can connect them directly to the network without having to use a computer (Windows or Mac) to share them. And they all ship with network-aware drivers for both the print and the scanning engines. At a stroke all your problems are eliminated. Note: Canon makes such a device, the MP620. It costs about half what the MP510 costs. HP, Epson, and Brother also make network-capable MFDs in that price range.

However, what is clear is that the MP510 is not going to work properly for you, not unless someone (Canon or the GutenPrint people or someone else) produces network-capable drivers for it. Don't hold your breath waiting for Canon to do it, and I expect that there's a reason why GutenPrint supports the MP500 and the MP520 but not the MP510. Sorry, but that's the way it is.

Hello Charles

First of all – many, many thanks for your reply. It is the first time someone has been able to explain what the problem is.

I obviously didn’t understand any of this before trying to hook it all up. The problem was I didn’t know that there WAS anything that needed understanding. I kept reading on the Internet about how Macs flawlessly talk to and work with PCs, it never crossed my mind that I needed to buy a special printer.

All my printers for years (with Windows) connected via a network (either wired or wireless) to the machine the printer was physically connected to.

I’m not quite sure what you mean by “network capable drivers.” My Mac can talk to the Windows PC (that the printer is connected to) without a problem, and exchange data in each direction.

With Windows, when a printer is shared, the same drivers are used on both the printer connected PC and the networked PCs. I’m surprised that Macs don’t work in a similar way. But anyway, they don’t. I shouldn’t be surprised really; I’ve had to buy a few other new things since buying a Mac just so the Mac stuff works properly.

Option 1 sounds best, although I’d have to be sure (somehow) that both Mac and PC will work with it properly before I buy, as well as be able to pick up scanned documents.

Thanks again

The thing is, usually it is easy to hook up a printer. Plug in the cable (USB or Ethernet), turn it on, select the printer in Print & Fax, go. That works 99% of the time. It's when it doesn't work that you have to jump through hoops.

Macs can share printers... if the vendor built the drivers correctly. Many vendors (HP, I'm looking at you) have gone out of their way to restrict things. This is different on Windows due to a different way of setting up the print system. Microsoft forced everyone to produce drivers which could allow a printer to be connected to one computer and shared over the network. Apple did not. Some vendors did the right thing (Brother, for example). Some other vendors (HP, and to a limited extent Epson) did not. The problem with sharing a printer from a computer was twofold:

1 the computer that was doing the sharing had to be on.

2 both computers had t have the same printer driver, or at least compatible printer drivers, installed.

The second part is where Macs often have problems, as the drivers supplied by the vendors (again, HP, I'm looking at you) often were not compatible with other drivers on Macs, much less on Windows. The 3rd-party driver industry (GutenPrint, the HPIJS people, many others) has sprung up precisely because of this. There are driver vendors which sell extremely expensive drivers, drivers which cost more than the printers did, sometimes by a factor of 3 or more, and which make a very good business out of it because _their stuff works_. And _works out of the box_. And _works across platforms_. Back when I was in the printing business the company used an extremely expensive print server system; it cost literally tens of thousands of dollars, and required a dedicated computer to run on, which was itself not cheap. But that system set up dedicated print queues for every network printer in the building, including the imagesetters. It was beautiful. Fast, powerful, able to generate separations, able to cache fonts, images, whole pages. Because the print server vendor supplied all drivers for the printers we would be using and which worked on both Macs and Windows (and, if we'd had any, which we didn't, Sun and BSD systems; this was serious heavy duty iron) everything worked correctly out of the box. We got better output with that system than with the vendors' own drivers.

You can get similar systems for a whole lot less, now, but they are still overkill for most purposes.

A 'network-capable' printer has a network card installed, either in the factory or aftermarket. As it has its own network card, it is not dependent on a computer to get on the network. And such a printer will ship with network-aware drivers, so it'll work.

I now refuse to buy a printer or MFD which does not have networking built in. In times past, the network card could add $200 or more to the price of the printer, but now you can get a network card for under $10 and many vendors are simply slapping Ethernet ports and wireless connections into their devices as a matter of course. With Brother, it's hard to get a device that doesn't have some kind of networking so long as you don't insist on sticking to the very lowest end, and Canon and Epson aren't that far behind. Even HP has woken up.

tyronehowe wrote:
With Windows, when a printer is shared, the same drivers are used on both the printer connected PC and the networked PCs. I’m surprised that Macs don’t work in a similar way.

They do. Your problem is that there isn't a proper driver written for the Mac OS for your printer.

Hello Barney

Thanks for your reply.

I’m not sure what you mean by “proper driver”?

The printer came with a specific Mac driver disc, which I have loaded onto my Mac. If I connect the printer directly to the Mac (via USB) all works well. It’s only if I try to print over a network that things go wrong. The installed Mac print driver doesn’t even show up in the list when adding a networked printer.

So I think it is certainly a “proper driver” in the sense that it helps to convert my documents into instructions for the printer. It’s just the network bit.

Charles has said that it’s the driver itself that needs to be network aware.

I guess the next experiment is to share the printer from a Mac instead of a Windows machine and see if I can connect to it from another Mac.