HPLIP

Does HPLIP enable ink volume control

Asked by Thomas

Is there any way of adjusting the intensity of ordinary black text so as to save ink.

I remember that way back in Windows 98 there was an Ink Volume control which had 3 settings Light - Medium - Dark. Is there any similar feature with HPLIP? I am using Ubuntu 9.04 with HPLIP 3.9.2.

Are the Brightness and Saturation controls purely for use in colour printing?

Thank you.

Thomas (UK)

Question information

Language:
English Edit question
Status:
Solved
For:
HPLIP Edit question
Assignee:
No assignee Edit question
Solved by:
Hartmut
Solved:
Last query:
Last reply:
Revision history for this message
Aaron Albright (albrigha-deactivatedaccount) said : 		#1

No, HPLIP does not control the volume of ink. For ink calibration you can use the align cartridge or clean functions.

Hope this helps.

Aaron

Revision history for this message
Best Hartmut (hartmut-krummrei) said : 		#2

Thomas,

I think you want to save ink and not align cartridges. You can do so by changing the "printout mode". Search for it in the printer-dialog. Its normaly set to "printer controlled" which means: the printer detects what kind of paper is in it and changes the quality of printout to the kind of paper. You can change that by hand to draft, normal, quality, high qualitity. Also in this dialog you'll find draft gray, normal gray, which means that the printer will only use the black ink cartridge. Hope this helps

Hartmut

Revision history for this message
Thomas (tmwilliamson-waitrose) said : 		#3

Hartmut,

Many thanks for your helpful answer. I had already discovered what you have suggested but there doesn't seem to be any difference in the blackness of the printing and therefore I assumed that there wasn't any saving in ink. At present I have Printout Mode set to Normal Grayscale (auto-detect paper type) and Quality set to 300dpi, Grayscale, Black Cartr. If I change the Quality setting to either 300 dpi Draft Grayscale Black Cartr or 300 dpi FastDraft Grayscale Black Cartr there is a noticeable increase in the printing speed (especially with FastDraft which must go through the printer in about 1 sec!).

With the Draft and FastDraft settings however the majority of the printout is perfect with the odd words or groups of words having their verticals bent - almost as if the word was in italics. I don't know if this is normal for this machine (HP Photosmart C4580) or if it is a hardware fault.

To save ink (I hope) when printing from OpenOffice I set the Font Colour to 70% Gray.

Best wishes.

Thomas