Why is the printer reversing black and white?

Question

I'm printing documents and images to a Samsung ML1630. It used to work fine, but now it prints white instead of black, black instead of white. Text documents come out white text on solid black background. Of course, it used to work fine. Before declaring the printer itself guilty, is it possible that something in my Linux setup, the kernel or printer driver or some hidden setting somewhere is causing this trouble?

Since this problem appeared about a month ago, I've updated everything with the package manager, rebooted a couple times, and the problem persists. Can't blame it on a cosmic ray!

Solution

I had something like this happen a while back and we eventually tracked it down to some Postscript code which told the printer to print in negative, but was not revoked, and was persistent through reboot.

Rest to defaults fixed it, but it took us a while going back through the logs to figure it out.

Comments

[tshepang]

How did you add the printer? What's the driver name? Is that driver recommended (system-config-printer displays a list of drivers, and notes what's recommended)?

[Gilles 'SO- stop being evil']

@DarenW: To see whether the problem is in the printer or in your computer system, try printing the printer's test page (if there's a way to do this from the printer on this model), or from a live CD/USB.

[DarenW]

I have a Knoppix CD somewhere. Running that could be informative, in case it's a goofed-up bit of software or config

[DarenW]

I got something off the Samsung site, and I recall some forum stating that normal CUPS won't work but to download some modified CUPS. Now, months later, I don't recall any of the details.

[DarenW]

The package manager tells me cups-usblp 1.4.4-1 is installed. This is Arch Linux, if I didn't mention already.

[DarenW]

I have since turned off and unplugged the printer, moved stuff to another room, switched to Ubuntu and then back to Arch, etc and now it's running fine. We'll never know exactly what was wrong...