The strangest thing happened to me the other day. Fresh off my euphoria over finally being able to print again, I started having trouble printing a particular image. The image printed fine the first two times but the trouble started when I changed the color density parameter in the new printer driver. Naturally, I assumed that the parameter was the problem. I changed it back to zero and tried printing again. That changed the manifestation, but not the nature, of the problem. I took it as tentative confirmation that I was on the right track and would be justified in blaming the problem on the new driver. I delved into the bowels of the operating system to remove the new driver and installed a driver that was yet newer from the Epson web site. That was a step backwards. I had fewer options, no monitor utility, and still the problem. The metaphorical light bulb over my head turned on and I decided to restore the driver from my previous day's Time Machine backup. That returned me to the familiar driver with the monitor utility and all the options I was used to seeing, but did not fix the problem.

I started analyzing what else could be wrong. I had been printing from Lightroom so I tried to print the same image from Photoshop. No bueno. Then I started thinking... this was a grayscale TIFF. I have an RGB version of the same file left over from some testing I was doing a year or so ago. I tried printing that and it came out perfectly! I printed several other images without any trouble. When I tried to print the suspect image again, I had the same trouble as before. Only part of the image would print but the print queue showed that it was still sending data to the printer. This is a bizarre bug, but apparently the driver or the printer doesn't like something about that particular image file. I will have to do more testing to determine whether this happens with all grayscale TIFFs or just that one file.

So the problem was apparently not the driver after all, but I'm not letting the driver off the hook just yet. The driver Epson has posted on their web site seems to be incomplete. The best I can determine at this point (without further testing) is that the new driver on their web site is missing some libraries and the monitor program. I happened to have the libraries requisite to enabling all the features, probably from the previous (Leopard) version of the driver. This is a reminder that newer is not always better. It also points out the value of keeping backups and the extraordinary utility of Time Machine. If you are on a Macintosh and are not using Time Machine, you are a fool. If you are on a Windows PC, you too are a fool. Okay, maybe not a fool, but missing out on a great feature at the least. I wouldn't be surprised if there is third-party software available for Windows that provides a function similar to Time Machine, but Time Machine is built into Mac OS 10.5 and higher and it works splendidly. If Apple ever reinstates ZFS in OS X and makes it the default filesystem, Time Machine will be even faster and better. Here's hoping!