Canon printer color printing too dark

Question

I have a Canon Pixma MG5520 printer/scanner combo. It works very well with Ubuntu 15.10 when printing in greyscale, and SimpleScan works fine. However, when I print in color, everything becomes darker than it should be. When the exact same document is printed from a Windows laptop, it looks fine.

This is one of the more odd things I have run across with Ubuntu, and if anyone has any ideas, then that would be great!

Solution 1

I had exactly the same problem with 15.10, but with a Canon Pixma MG5250. This is how I came across your question. Apparently the Cups+Gutenprint driver uses wrong default settings. As is also the case for selecting the rear tray for standard paper.

I corrected this as follows:

• In System Settings - Printers, right-click the printer icon and select properties.

• In the left pane select Printer Options.

• Then change the Color Model from RGB Color into CMYK (or CMY if your printer uses only cyan, magenta and yellow cartridges).

Be aware that the application from which you are printing may also have printer settings that may override the printer driver settings. So also there make sure to change RGB into CMYK.

Solution 2

I use Ubuntu studio

my printer is a canon MG 3550. I've had problems with colour correction, and connectivity with this printer, however i recently fixed them with the following steps.

settings manager-> Printers -> add printers (before pressing "add printer", connect your printer via usb and make sure its off before you connect it to your computer)-> In the box underneath the title "select device", click on network printer, now turn on your printer and wait-> a selection canon MG3500 appears click on it-> then click the button forward located on the bottom left. then click apply.

once i did that the printer was installed but the colours were not correct, to fix this i did the following.

using libre office. File -> Print -> Properties -> Device

the settings i changed were

• colour model changed to CYMK
• ink type changed to CYMK
• colour correction changed to bright colours
• bright fine adjustment to 0.035
• contrast to 0.800
• printer language changed to automatic:pdf
• Colour changed to Colour
• colour depth changed to 24bit

those settings gave me a perfect colour image, with my circumstances

Comments

[pa4080]

Hello, @tmfarnham, what is the difference from the accepted answer?

[tmfarnham]

The only difference is that it adds the MG5550 printer and Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

[Luca Carlon]

Worked for me as well. Shouldn't this be reported somewhere? The solution is very simple but an inexperienced user may not find it.