Canon ip4500 under Ubuntu 7.10

My old epson 760 stylus kept crashing so I bit the bullet and went for a Canon ip4500 printer.

One of the reasons for this was that the reviews were good, I had read that you can print to 3x5 index cards on this series of printers, and you can also buy cheap ink cartridges at around £3.50 per cartridge.

The inks are also individual, so you only replace the one you need, not all three colours.

I used a windows dual-boot machine to run through the setup under XP, as the printer comes with a CD which does a printing alignment test. I’m not sure whether you can do this under Linux at all. This takes about 13 minutes to run, and at the end you are left with 2 pages with some black and blue boxes on them. It doesn’t tell you what you should be looking for. As there was nothing flashing, I assumed everything was OK and proceeded to hit the Next button as instructed on the installation sheet. In my view this is not helpful!

At present [Dec 2007] the usual CUPS drivers don’t support this model but the free version of Turboprint does

http://www.turboprint.de/english.html

Downloaded and Installed the files as per the website. Within minutes I was running the GUI which installed the printer and drivers into CUPS for me.

Very easy and straightforward. I have printed to a4 and that works fine. Also tried a4 300dpi draft mode, which really shoots through the printing at a fast lick.

I have also printed succesfully to 3x5 index cards for the DIY Hipster PDA cards (see for kits to download). Although you can’t actually set a custom size to print on 3x5 cards, if you set the width to 3.9 inches by 5 inches, I find that this actually works OK. the quality of printing on my 3x5 cards is much better than I was getting with the old Epson.

Note that to get higher resolutions you need to pay for a registration key. I haven’t needed this yet as I haven’t tried printing any photos.