[Scribus] HP 2550L colour standards

Frank Cox melville.theatre
Wed Feb 23 08:50:38 CET 2005


I just purchased a colour laser printer (HP 2550L) to print coloured
labels for bags of candy.  I'm creating the labels using Scribus, of
course.

This thing has 27 settable options in the printer driver, some of
which I don't understand.

Under "CMYK Inks", my choices are Fast, SWOP, EuroScale and Device. 
What is the difference between these and why would I want one rather
than another?  Googling around I find that these are apparently colour
standards of some sort, which is nice, but how is this important to me
and how do I want to set this to obtain the best-looking job?

Incidentally (and somewhat off-topic), for anyone who's considering a
colour laser you might want to look at this one.  It advertises full
support under Linux as it's a Postscript printer.  This is true,
except for one thing that I am currently trying to get some follow-up
from HP technical support about (without success so far).  There is
apparently a cleaning program that must be run on it periodically and
the program ("HP Toolkit") is apparently available only for Windows. 
Handy.  Out of the five computers in my house, exactly zero have any
version of Windows on them or even available to be installed on them. 
The documentation says that for other operating systems, see the
Readme file on the CD that comes with the printer.  Of course, there
is no Readme file on that CD.

One issue that I have not yet solved is that while this printer does
beautiful colour from Gimp and Scribus, I can't get anything but
grayscale out of OpenOffice.  Not a big deal as I don't think I'll
ever need to print colour from OpenOffice and maybe I'll figure that
out someday anyway.  It seems to be a nice printer at "first use". 
Heavy, of course, and kind of noisy when it's printing, but the colour
is comparable to a newer inkjet. and the price is quite reasonable.  I
got this for about $500; I recall that colour lasers were about
$15,000 a few years ago and $50,000 and up a few years before that.




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