Mitsubishi P95D

The Mitsubishi P95D is the latest model in a line of Medical/Scientific monochromatic thermal printers that can often be found attached to the likes of Ultrasound stations.

As of December 20th, it now has first-class Linux support as part of Gutenprint, complete with status/error reporting, multiple copy support, custom page sizes, and every other feature the printer exports.

I may try to extend support to older models in the family (P93 and P91) or other MedSci thermal printers if there's any interest.

Oh, here's a shot of the P95 in action:

228432:338206

Update 2017/02/11 The Mitsubishi P93D now has first-class support as well.

Improvements for newer Canon SELPHY models

About a year of so ago I added support for the newer Canon SELPHY printers (CP820, CP910, CP1000, and CP1200) into Gutenprint. Despite using the same media kits as their older siblings, under their plastic bodies they sported a new print engine that worked fairly differently.

Slightly different print sizes, a Y'CbCr image format, and, surprisingly, they appeared to be sane USB Printer class models and not require a special backend to handle communications.

Fast forward to last week, and it turns out that was a premature assessment. While the printers didn't require any special hand holding to print a single image, they would lock up if one would send over two jobs back-to-back. Canon still can't implement proper flow control.

Time to break out the sniffer and capture some multi-page jobs! A quick flurry of hacking later, and the 'canonselphyneo' backend was born. It brings along sane flow control, status reporting, and error detection on par with the selphyneo's older siblings.

I also discovered the 'L' print size was incorrect. All of this will will be in Gutenprint 5.2.12-pre5 or newer, but the current backend can always be grabbed from my selphy_print repository.

Oh, as I write this, I don't have the USB IDs for the CP820 or CP1000 models. I need those so they'll be recognized by the backend. Holler if you have one!

Update 2017/01/06: I now have the CP1000 ID; only the CP820 is missing.

Modern Infrastructure

227298:335950

Last week I was sent off to South Korea with two days' notice. The weather was lousy, jet lag brutal, and the work unforgiving, but this impressive snarl caught my eye while waiting in line at one of Seoul's many, many, many coffee shops.

Call for testing on Mitsubishi printers

In the past I've written about the particularly poor level of support for Mitsubishi printers under Linux. In the past couple of months, that has changed substantially, although not due to any action or assistance on Mitsubishi's part.

Gutenprint 5.2.11 had usable support for the CP-9550DW and CP-9550DW-S models, including an intelligent backend that handled the printer communications. However, the rest of the CP-9xxx family wasn't supported.

The 5.2.12 release of Gutenprint will support most of the CP-9xxx family. This includes a considerable amount of work on the backend, generalizing it so that the other models can be cleanly handled. This was a rather disruptive change, so it's possible the formerly-working CP-9550 family has regressed. Beyond that, the newly-supported models need testing to confirm that everything functions as expected.

Here is the list of all models affected by this development:

  • CP-9000DW
  • CP-9500DW
  • CP-9550DW (previously working, needs retesting)
  • CP-9550DW-S (previously working, needs retesting)
  • CP-9600DW (confirmed working)
  • CP-9600DW-S
  • CP-9800DW
  • CP-9800DW-S (confirmed working!)
  • CP-9810DW
  • CP-9820DW-S

Also, I still need testers for the following models:

  • DNP DS80DX
  • Sony UP-CR10L (aka DNP DS-SL10)
  • Mitsubishi CP-D70DW, CP-D707DW, CP-K60DW-S, CP-D80DW, and CP-D90DW (plus their -S variants!)
  • Fujifilm ASK-300
  • Sinfonia CHC-S1245/E1 and CHC-S6245/CE1
  • Kodak 7000/7010/7015 and 8810

If anyone reading this has access to one or more of these printers, please drop me a line!

UPDATE 10/27: There were definitely some bugs to be had, but now the CP-9600DW and CP-K60DW-S are now confirmed working!

UPDATE 11/18: After fixing a couple of bugs, the CP-D70DW and CP-D80DW are now confirmed working.

Mitsubishi CP-D70 family, working!

Over the past few years, I've written a lot about the various members of the Mitsubishi CP-D70 family of printers, and how they were utterly worthless under Linux.

These printers are unusual in that they required the host computer to perform perform gamma correction and thermal compensation to the image data in order to generate sane output. (If this sounds familiar, it's because the Sinfonia CS2 was similarly afflicted). This relied on unknown, proprietary algorithms only implemented within Mitsubishi's drivers.

To make along story short, I've been attempting to reverse engineer those algorithms for nearly three years, and I'm pleased to announce that I've finally succeeded. While I can't promise the results are identical to Mitsubishi's own code, It is now possible to generate high-quality prints with these printers using entirely Free Software.

The library is called 'libMitsuD70ImageReProcess', released to the public under a GPLv3+ license.

Just to be absolutely clear, Mitsubishi is not responsible for this library in any way, and will not support you if you complain that the output is somehow deficient or your printer catches fire when you try to print pictures of Margaret Thatcher posing in her skivvies.

Here's the list of the now-functional printers:

  • Mitsubishi CP-D70DW, CP-D707DW, CP-K60DW-S, CP-D80DW
  • Kodak 305
  • Fujifilm ASK-300

While all of these models are expected to work, only the Kodak 305 has actually been tested. Please drop me an email or comment here if you have one of these printers and would like to help test things out.

In particular, if there's someone out there with a dual-decker CP-D707DW, there are opportunities for further enhancements that I'd like to try.

All code except for the library is now committed into Gutenprint, but is not yet part of any [pre-]release. So if you want to test this stuff out, you'll need to grab the latest Gutenprint code and libMitsu70ImageReProces out of git and compile/install them manually. Once this is a little more stable I'll package the library code in a tarball for simpler distribution.

In other news, while the Kodak 305's official Windows drivers only expose 4x6 and 8x6 prints, the printer firmware also supports the 6x6, 4x6-x2, and 2x6-x2 sizes that the Mitsubishi CP-K60DW-S supports. You'll need to ensure you're using the 1.04 firmware! I have also received reports that the '305 will accept the K60's print media, so in theory 5x7 and 6x9 support is possible.

Happy printing!

UPDATE 2016/11/17

Assuming that your distro already includes an up-to-date Gutenprint (5.2.12-pre4 or newer), here is what you will need to do in order to use these printers:

            git clone https://git.shaftnet.org/cgit/selphy_print.git/
            cd selphy_print
            make
            sudo make install
            cd lib70x
            make
            sudo make install
            sudo bash
            echo '/usr/local/lib' >> /etc/ld.so.conf.d/local.conf
            ldconfig
            exit
            cd ..

Once you have that done, run this with the printer attached:

    sudo ./mitsu70x testjobs/mitsu_d70x_4x6-8bpp.raw # D70/D707/D80
    sudo ./mitsu70x testjobs/mitsu_k60_4x6-8bpp.raw  # K60
    sudo ./mitsu70x testjobs/kodak_305_4x6-8bpp.raw  # Kodak 305

As well as spitting out a page, you should see the following message in the output. Any WARNINGs or ERRORs are a sign that the library wasn't installed properly:

            INFO: Image processing library successfully loaded

At this point, you can set the printer up using CUPS or your distro's printer tool, and all will be well.

(Note that Gutenprint 5.2.12-pre5 or newer will include all necessary selphy_print changes, but not the processing library)