Canon iP4200 grayscale printing fails

Printing to my Canon Pixma iP4200 has never worked properly in Ubuntu 12.04 and its finally got to the point where I decided to do something about it.

My preferred default settings are grayscale, two-sided, and it looks like I've been bitten by a bug with grayscale printing.  The result is either a row of dots near the top of the page, or a group of dots further down the page.  The effect is similar to what would happen on an old ribbon printer when the ribbon was dry or running out of ink, you can see that it's trying to print letters, but they're unreadable.

Ubuntu 12.04 uses gutenprint 5.2.8-pre1 and the bug appears to be specific to that version as I've been able to work around the issue in two separate ways:

1. Manually install the 5.0.1 driver from http://www.openprinting.org/printer/Canon/Canon-iP4000
2. Build the 5.2.8 driver from http://sourceforge.net/projects/gimp-print/files/gutenprint-5.2/5.2.8/ and manually replace the link to libgutenprint.so.3.0.0.

Obviously neither of these are ideal.  What I'd like is one of a patch for gutenprint 5.2.8-pre1 that fixes the problem, or supported upgrade to 5.2.8 or 5.2.9.

I've submitted a bug report: Bug #1151207 @ Launchpad.

10 Mar 2013: And a post in Ubuntu Forums: Re: Cups seems broken under 12.04 LTS...