This is not a duplicate of this question, since that deals with a different printer, and has a different solution which I've already verified doesn't work.
I'm dealing with an Epson XP-2105 printer. The printer used to work on a similar laptop running 20.04. Today, from a new laptop running 22.04, it doesn't work:
- I want to print a grayscale document using the black cartridge.
- When it prints black, it uses a mix of CMY inks, not ok
- It will not print a test page: I press "print test page" in the printer settings dialog, and a job is added and then immediately vanishes.
I'm running Ubuntu 22.04 LTS; Let me know if other info is needed as well as how to retrieve it
Update 1: It's not (just) an issue with default vs. Epson drivers
I thought... perhaps it is an issue with the default printer drivers? So,
- I deleted the current printer instance in the "Printers" control panel.
- I grabbed the epson-inkjet-printer-escpr_1.7.21-1lsb3.2_amd64.deb driver from Epson's website, and installed it. Note that if you try to find this driver from Epson's main page, it will tell you Linux is unsupported. Given the apparently poor behavior of this driver, that may as well be the case. Search from this page instead (some sources say you should omit the operating system on the initial query).
- In the "Printers" control panel, I clicked "add"; I can see The Epson XP-2015 as "Epson XP-2100 (583644363032323230&interfaces=1)". I added this, it said "searching for drivers".
- After adding, it asks if I want to print a test page. I said yes → The test page prints, but is still using a CMY mixture in place of black. NOT OK
In summary, removing the printer, adding Epson's official driver .deb, fixed the "test page won't print" glitch. But, this did not fix the issue of it using CMY mixture for black (despite a working black cartridge being present). Additionally, the options under Printers control panel → right-click on printer → Properties → Printer Options are unchanged from before:
- There is no option to e.g. select black-and-white only.
- There is a "Grayscale" option, which I've already tried, it sends all colors to gray, but then renders this gray using a CMY mix.
So, I'm not convinced installing "Epson's" driver worked: the interface looks the same as before, which means:
- Ubuntu had already found the correct driver the first time?
- The newly added driver isn't being used?
- Ubuntu's and Epson's drivers contain the same bug?
Update 2: I'm not convinced that black ink heads are simply clogged
I've run some experiments. Printing a test page on "Plain" paper with the "Grayscale" option "Off" renders blacks/grays using CMY. But, printing with "Grayscale" "On" prints a blank page. Likewise, text documents printed with "Plain", "Epson Photo Quality Ink Jet", "Epson Matte", or "Envelope" paper types are blank. However, printing on any "Glossy" paper type works. This suggests the hypothesis:
- Black ink printer heads are clogged
- Ubuntu's test page uses as non-neutral gray instead of black, which triggers (automatically) to render these shades as a CMY mix instead of using the K ink, disguising this issue.
- Glossy paper types add CMY mix atop black (K) layer, disguising this issue.
I did the following to test this hypothesis:
- Multiple (at least 4) rounds of "cleaning" the print heads did not resolve the issue.
- Curiously, printing a black Inkscape document with progressively finer black lines, with "Photo Paper Glossy-Standard" seems to actually use black ink: No matter how thin I make features, there is absolutely no evidence of the CMY dithering-pattern that I see on the test-page black/grays.
- Likewise, documents with mixed blacks/grays seem to render a true black when printed with "Photo Paper Glossy-Standard". However, soaking recently-printed documents in water reveals some cyan and magenta colors bleeding from black lines, so perhaps "black" is still rendering using a CMY mix. (I would be surprised if the ink in the "black" cartridge was itself composed of a mix cyan/magenta dyes, but who knows).
This is what I think is happening:
- The black print heads are irrevocably clogged or have failed due to other hardware/software bugs, but "Glossy" paper settings the printer can overlay CMY colors with sufficient density to render a good black, at high resolutions, with no apparent dithering.
- OR The black print heads have failed at a software/firmware level, or are behaving a bit strangely, such that the usage-pattern employed by "Glossy" paper types allows some black ink to come through.
If its scenario (1), there's very little I can do — I've already tried running the clean-print-heads routine several times. If it's scenario (2), this suggests that it might actually be a software bug at some level. There may yet be some way to convince it to use the black ink as if it were printing on Glossy paper, without adding the CMY colors on top.
Update 3: Is it really using the black ink?
It seems like the printer might actually be able to print with black, but only when using "Glossy" paper settings. I wanted to monitor the ink levels to see whether the black ink was being used. But! "Printer Properties" → "Ink/Toner Levels" just says "Marker levels are not reported for this printer".
I installed epson-printer-utility from here. Running it gave the following error:
libQtCore.so.4: cannot open shared object file
The only way to fix this is to get QT4 from a PPA as described here. However, this won't work anymore for 22.04, since that PPA doesn't have a release file for 22.04 ("jammy"). You can go in to your apt sources and change "jammy" to "focal" to brute-force bypass this. These instructions say that this will remove qt5 in 20.04. I'm certain this will cause something bad to happen in 22.04 as well, but I'm not sure what or how to fix it.
Anyway, I can now run epson-printer-utility, except it immediately exits with an error:
> epson-printer-utility
Communication daemon down, Error code = -1
The solution to this is to first run sudo systemctl start ecbd.service as stated here.
After all of this, I could run epson-printer-utility; All it does is show a graphical rendering of the ink levels. There is no quantitative report of the ink levels, and you can't trigger actions e.g. cleaning the print heads this way.
So, I took a screenshot of epson-printer-utility, printed a page of █, and ran the utility again. I measured the percentage used by comparing the pixel heights of the bar-graph displays from the printer utility.
Printing a full black page used 5% of the K and Y cartridges, and 10% of the M and C cartridges. This is a lot. But, at least, the Epson XP-2105 claims to be using up black ink here. And why would Epson, the trusted corporation, lie to us?
Current state of affairs:
It seems to print OK blacks with some settings, and reports that black ink is being used. It's possible that the black printheads are completely broken, and the "black" I'm seeing is a CMY mix. However, the black ink that is being used up must be going somewhere. This seems consistent with only two scenarios:
- It's still possible to print black, but there is something that is broken at the software/firmware level. (I started seeing weird behavior a while ago when Epson forced an over-the-air firmware update via Wifi. So, the vendor remote-bricking the printer by sheer incompetence is definitely in the cards.)
- The black print heads really did fail permanently (after very little use). The black ink that is being "used up" is (A) still in the cartridge, i.e. the ink cartridge or printer is faking ink levels based on assumed usage, rather than real reserves. (Not cool) (B) Somewhere else, pooling inside the printer, waiting to create a horrible mess when I least expect it.
It's very likely we should blame Epson here:
- Did they break the machine with a non-consensual firmware update?
- Are their print-heads not-fit-for-purpose, such that they fail very early?
- Are their printers faking ink usage information?
But there may still be some hope of fixing this software side:
- Some settings do seem to use black ink
- All we need is a way to test these settings but force it to use no CMY inks.
- This will clarify (at last) whats happening.
Is there any way to achieve this from Ubuntu? Force the Epson XP-2105 to use the black printer head the same way as it would for the Glossy paper, but preventing it from using any CMY inks?
Are there any other known Linux/Ubuntu glitches this resembles?
