[Herefordshire] printer driver from disk

[Graham Cole]

Hi Julian & others
My printer is an Epson Stylus Color 660 and it worked well enough with
Red Hat 9 but with Ubuntu, using the recommended driver which was there
with the distro ready to be chosen, the printing is very pale. When I do
a test using the printer's buttons the outcome is properly black and 3
colours. A test page from my OS gives pale results. When I was thrashing
around with things I got a partial crash and printing went wrong, giving
pages of text which I  assume was raw postscript. It came out properly
black.
Now after fsck I am back to square 1 but found a foomatic conf file
which was completely commented out with # on all lines. Should this
really be left as I found it or is there some foomatic or cups tweaking
which Ubuntu has failed to guide me to (or do for me automatically)?
I did check out linuxprinters.org where I learnt that gimpprint can give
better results than normal print drivers. Trying to set that up I got
the crash which stopped my Open Office and mucked up my printing
altogether. 
Grateful for any hints
Graham