February 07, 2014 @ 10:00 EST

Yet more Dyesub printer hacking

Over the past month, there's been a push to get the Gutenprint codebase in shape for the long-overdue 5.2.10 release. This will be the first release incorporating the various CUPS backends I've written plus an expanded supported printer list.

This has resulted in a flury of bugfixes and improvements to the backends, including:

  • Support for multi-page print jobs
  • Sony UP-DR200 support
  • Canon SELPHY CP790 support
  • Vastly improved error detection and recovery for all Canon SELPHY models.
  • Printjob pipelining support for the DNP DS40/DS80
  • Support for the Citizen CX/CX-W/CY printers

The Citizen printer support deserves its own set of comments. It turns out that the DNP DS40/DS80/DSRX1 models are just rebadged Citizen CX/CX-W/CY models (down to the same USB IDs!) and they all use an indentical command language.

There are more Citizen models (CW-01, CW-02, OP900, OP900II) that have been rebadged by others too, and every single one of these supposedly supports the same command language as the CX/CX-W family. Most notably, Mitsubishi's CP3800 appears to be a rebadged CX-W.

I like it when things JustWork(tm)! Unfortunately, since I don't know the USB IDs for that second list of printers, I can't add them to the backend match list.

My interest in adding more printers to Gutenprint for the sake of it has waned somewhat, for several reasons -- First, my personal and professional printing needs are now well-met. Second, I have less free time to devote to such things. And finally, the norm for these dye-sublimation photo printers seems to be to require an intelligent backend, and I can't begin to write one without access to the particular printer.

The Mitsubishi CP3800, CP9550, and CP3020 series haven't been tested. The CP-D70/D707/K60 models are known to need a backend (and it's written!) but my original tester disappeared. (I've also started reverse-engineering the CP9600 spool file format, but that's on hold until after tax season..)

The Kodak 9810 and 8500 (itself a rebadged CP3020) also remain untested.

So, if anyone out there has access to one of these printers and is interested in helping improve their Linux support, speak up!

Similarly, if there's some other dye-sublimation photo printer you'd like to see working under Linux, we can probably help each other out. The recent Citizen/DNP and Shinko/Sinfonia additions/suppport were the result of such collaborations.


Posted by Solomon Peachy | Permanent link & Comments | File under: Free Software