Canon BJC-4300 printer - not able to configure

[ViskoLinux]

I think this is just a little problem:
I've got Mandrake 9 perfectly running. No special hardware, appart from the mentioned printer. Hardrake gets the model but it can't print well enough. Letters are too big and smudgy, and only the first half of the sentences appear on the sheet. I've read something about setting resolution to 360x360 but it still doesn't work. I updated the CUPS drivers (which taught me a lot about RPMs and updating Linux software :D) but I still don't get the results. Juts say that I mainly want the printer for OpenOffice documents.
Thank you :)

[mdwatts]

Any other printer options you can change that may fix the problem? Fonts etc. ?

See if you can find anything to help in these G4L search results for 'BJC-4300 mandrake cups' (http://www.google.com/linux?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8859-1&q=BJC-4300+mandrake+cups).

[gazdean]

I had the exact same problem.
I was using the photo inkjet cartridge which is currently not supported. I switched to a standard colour cartridge and then the printer worked fine.

[ViskoLinux]

Ok, I've got the solution, more or less. No new drivers, no cartridge change (it's a BC-20 Black cartridge). As mdwatts pointed, I had to play with the printer configuration. It was not easy, as most of the options I had changed left the printing just as before. First I set the characters per inch to 7 instead of 12. The Ghostcript resolution didn't matter, but the quality really did. 360x360 DPI (not DMT) made the letters their appropriate size. 3 minutes more and I discovered that setting density (2) and contrast (4) to their maximum value made the letters really black (they were grey before). It's not a perfect printing, and I think it's slower than in windows, but it's acceptably readable and I'll fix speed as time goes on.

Thank you, mdwatts and gazdean!