I'm not conceited enough to think that my previous rants have anything to do with Epson's recent Mac driver update for the Stylus Photo 2200 printer. In fact, I don't think anyone reads this blog and certainly not anyone of any importance at Epson. Nevertheless, a new driver showed up recently in Software Update.

I hesitated to install the update (if you don't understand why, go back and read my previous posts on the matter). Much to my surprise, it was a pretty significant upgrade. I'm guessing Epson finally got around to rewriting the driver for Intel-based Macs because the driver is blazingly fast now. Either Rosetta has a significant startup time or it's just plain slow. Of course, the printer itself is still the bottleneck but it only took about two seconds to generate and queue an 11x17 photograph at 360 PPI and 2880 DPI from Photoshop with the new driver. The old driver took at least 10 seconds, and usually closer to 15 to do the same thing.

The new driver also comes with an improved user interface and a rewritten Epson Printer Utility (now at v4).

The driver still doesn't support black-only printing but that may be okay. I noticed that black and white images printed in the normal way (not black-only mode) are much more neutral than before. I have to say that this improved driver, while far too late, goes a fair way towards ameliorating my vexation with Epson.