Default driver choices are completely wrong sometimes

Which model do you have? Some HP LaserJets do not perform very well and I have marked HPIJS as recommended driver for them.

Does gnome-cups-manager really obey the marking "recommended" for the default driver choice?

I don't understand the second question :) However there are a couple of HP laserjet 9000 here at our department, and I discovered that hpijs works better - if you have different information I can make some further test.

For the second question:

Set up a printer with gnome-cups-manager. After having chosen the model, gnome-cups-manager offers to you the drivers which support your printer. Usually one is marked "recommended". Is this one selected by default?

In my case, yes, and it's the first of the list. In all cases where I found more than one driver, the first one is the recommended one (and the others are alphabetically sorted) , it is selected and on the button it says Postscript (recommended) in english, and then on the right end of the button it says "consigliato" which is the italian translation of recommended.

FYI: yes g-c-m always selects the recommended driver by default.
When none of the PPDs of a printer model has an indication "(recommended)" g-c-m selects no printer driver by default and just shows a blanc entry.
So it is important to have a recommended driver for a printer model.

On PostScript printers usually the manufacturer-supplied PPD file is the recommended one, but manufacturers do not add "(recommended)" to the file. So we can fix this only by modifying the gnome-cups-manager to select the manufacturer-supplied PPD in case that there is no "(recommended)" or we need to hack the cups-driverd (part of CUPS which lists the available PPDs) to add a "(recommended)" to the appropriate lines of its list output.

This is still a problem in gutsy: drivers marked as recommended can even have terrible output, while drivers that should really be recommended are down in the list of printer drivers. Today I set up a ricoh aficio that, with the recommended driver, printed like as a 10 dpi resolution. I changed the driver (randomly, since even if I am experienced I don't really know what all these printer drivers are) and print looked really better.

Till, could you confirm the bug?

[Expired for gnome-cups-manager (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

This is a bug in ubuntu, for sure, has been in "incomplete" status for several months, if you need more information just ask, or feel free to mark as new. Staying in incomplete status, it expired for no reason.,

Not a gnome-cups-manager bug, reassigning to foomatic-db.
Marking as New since nobody else has confirmed this bug.

Ok, I edited the description to reflect current situation, however I thought it was a common problem since it is a problem in 100% of printers I tried ubuntu with. If not, I will be more precise on drivers and printers, because these might be the only printers affected.

My problem with quality is due to evince, not printing. I think this bug should be closed for now, I will reopen if and when it is a problem again.

Closing with "Invalid" instead of "Fix Released" as no change related to this problem was done on foomatic-db.

I saw a recent update in gutsy saying "fixed default selection of foomatic-db driver" or something like that - perhaps unrelated and in the very end it does not count too much.