Printers: HP Photosmart, not so smart

[ellis rowell]

I have had a lot of problems with printers.
Epson stylus C680, worked very well, excellent photo prints, until it failed (after several years).
Canon Pixma IP1600, couldn't get it to work at all.
Brother DCP135C, couldn't get it to work at all.
Minolta Magicolor 2400W Laser, couldn't get it to work at all.
HP Laserjet 1020 (Laser) works fine, even does high quality mono photo's.
HP Photosmart C4280, Scanner works OK, document printing OK, Photo printing, several problems, not least paper sizes. There's no user setting and A5 is the smallest A form paper setting (I normally use A6 photo paper, 4 cut from A4 sheet).

I got rid of the Brother printer and bought the HP C4280 as my experience with the HP Lj 1020 gave me the impression that it would be as easy to use as the 1020.

It looks as though I shall have to use the Canon under Windows to do my photo printing.

[klange]

Printers are that one thing no one ever talks about but a majority of users have problems with...

[Zimmer]

Have you installed hplip?
http://hplip.sourceforge.net/

According to the table your printer has support.

Personally I have given up on photo printing at home. It is cheaper and more reliable to take the data to Asda or Boots and have snaps printed there. Alternatively, Online printing houses do a good job too.
Still using a 5 year old HP 930c for the occasional letter or birthday card or CD label.

[acelin]

Have you installed hplip?
http://hplip.sourceforge.net/

According to the table your printer has support.

Personally I have given up on photo printing at home. It is cheaper and more reliable to take the data to Asda or Boots and have snaps printed there. Alternatively, Online printing houses do a good job too.
Still using a 5 year old HP 930c for the occasional letter or birthday card or CD label.

Yeah HP has great support for Linux with their printers. I had this cheap crap HP printer that would never work in Windows, but worked flawlessly in Ubuntu without installing anything.

[ellis rowell]

Yes, I do have hplip installed. The prints I get are good quality but on an A6 there is always a very wide margin at the trailing end (12mm as against 3mm on the other three sides). Looks like the only way to use it is to trim off 9mm. Thinking the problem was due to aspect ration I cropped the photo but that resulted in some being cropped off the length when printed and the same margins were still there. I can't see any way round it.