Printing album pages on Macintosh

OK, this is going to get REALLY geeky and nitpicky.

I own a Macintosh.  The Mac uses a printing subsystem called CUPS, which stands for Common UNIX Printing System. This was a printer framework written fro Linux. Apple bought the software from the gentleman that developed it and hired.

Well, CUPS hasn't been updated in close to 2 years.  The original author left Apple and actually started work on CUPS again.

So, being an uber-nerd, I have an old ThinkPad laptop with Linux on it.  I print some pages out on that laptop and, to my eyes, they look cripser and clearer than what my Mac printed just a few hours earlier.

This made NO sense to me, since both Linux and the Mac were using CUPS. The output should be the same.

So, I go down to the Mac and try to update my printer driver.  I download the latest from the Epson and Brother websites and install them. Then I go into the printing control panel and notice that both printers are listed and they both say "AirPrint," which is Apple's technology to allow iPhone and iPads to print to printers in your house.  I assumed that AirPrint was just a network communication protocol. It seems I was wrong.

I delete both printers and went to add them back in.  And I had a choice of either installing the AirPrint printer and/or the CUPS printer.

So I installed both.

And, I printed one page of one of my stamp pages on each driver with the same quality settings.

To my eyes, the CUPS printed page had a much cleaner and clearer print on it than the AirPrint page.  It's wasn't a "night and day" difference, but it was enough for me to notice.

So, if you have a Mac, try to install a CUPS driver instead of an AirPrint driver and let me know if you notice the same subtle improvement I saw.