Apple moved to CUPS (common unix printing system) for Panther. That’s all well and good, but in order to do so, they blotted out currently installed vendor drivers. That might have been all well and good, but some of the CUPS drivers aren’t as capable as the commercial versions. Which meant that Amy’s color Epson no longer had a gamma control, and no longer had an option to use black ink only.
Panther means nothing to Amy. She doesn’t care about a new Finder, doesn’t care about Expose, or any of the other “150 new features.” Things were fine in Jaguar, and now her printer was broken, while she was in the middle of a long-term printing project.
Operating system upgrades should add features not remove them. Apple could at least give you the option of using one driver or the other. Fortunately, I discovered that the old drivers do still work, but you have to remove the CUPS driver first. Here’s what I did:
Go into /Library/Printers/Epson and find SP890.plugin.
Ctrl-click | Make Archive to create a zipped version.
Delete the plugin.
Reinstall Epson’s downloadable driver.
Restart.
Back in business, but what a crock.