Increasing printer speed

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I own an Epson Stlus Photo 870 and am intrested in maximizing the print speed. Does paper type or quality come into play? Any suggestions?

Also is there any difference in paper absorption in matte heavy weight vs. glossy?

-- Russ Snyder (Snydr@aol.com), April 16, 2000

Answers

There's usually a speed vs. quality slider in the newer Epson printer drivers. If you haven't spotted it, I'd suggest reading the manual. I just purchased a 760 this past week and they had several suggestions regarding increased print speed in the manual, but don't expect miracles.

Bear in mind that speed is usually a tradeoff against print quality. In the past, I've tried several methods with the original Epson Stylus Color printer. You can print at a lower DPI, 360 or 720 are often faster than 1440. You can print with fine diffusion rather than error diffusion(faster, but not great for medium to large photos). There's also a bi-directional printing setting usually called fast or faster printing that prints in both directions while the head is moving. It's not quite as accurate as printing in only one direction, but does help speed things up. Really the thing to do is consult the manual and investigate the custom settings.

You can also make sure your printer port is set up correctly for ECP or EPP mode in your computer's BIOS. ECP is faster, but you may have to settle for EPP, either is faster than standard. I had to settle for EPP on my laptop as I kept getting errors from the driver routines in ECP.

Beyond that, a faster processor with a LOT of RAM helps, or so I'm told... I still run a K6-233 jacked up to 266 and a 133mhz laptop. It also helps if your hard drive is defragmented regularly, and moreso if your windows swap file is on a different physical hard disk from the one the swap files from your application program are stored. At least 32MB of RAM is a must! 64MB or 128MB would be better.

Good Luck.

-- Gerald M. Payne (gmp@francomm.com), April 16, 2000.


Modern printers have hardly any processor power of their own, they rely on the host computer to do the RIP (Raster image processing) for them. So printing speed is dependent on what CPU you've got in your computer. As Gerald says, a faster processor and bags of memory will speed up your printer, and your scanner too if you've got one.

-- Pete Andrews (p.l.andrews@bham.ac.uk), April 17, 2000.

Hi folks i am new to this forum. But here is a cool Reg hack. Windows 98 accesses your swap file before it runs out of ram.(Physical Mem). From a users point of view this is Nuts, especially if you have bags of memory.Virtial memory (swap file) is much slower than Physical(Ram) memory. Yes there is a fix. If you have more than 64 meg of ram and are running 98 2nd ed. As allways back up your regristy!!!!! Go to start. Run. Type msconfig. go to system ini tab

-- Larry Eagar (leagar@nightowl.net), May 25, 2000.

Hi folks i am new to this forum. But here is a cool Reg hack. Windows 98 accesses your swap file before it runs out of ram.(Physical Mem). From a users point of view this is Nuts, especially if you have bags of memory.Virtial memory (swap file) is much slower than Physical(Ram) memory. Yes there is a fix. If you have more than 64 meg of ram and are running 98 2nd ed. As allways back up your regristy!!!!! Go to start. Run. Type msconfig. go to system ini tab. highlight 386Enh click new at bottom of pane. A box opens, in the box Type "conservativeswapfileusage=1" without the Quotes. Click apply. Click ok. You will be prompted to reboot for settings to be effective. You will find your system more resopnsive. Especially if you have indecent ammounts of memory like i fortunatly do (384 meg) Especially when you are in Photo Shop.

Larry

-- Larry Eagar (leagar@nightowl.net), May 25, 2000.


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