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Increasing the Print Speed

General tips
Using the Speed & Progress dialog box (Windows only)

Follow the instructions in this section to increase the print speed of your printer.

General tips

Just as printing at a high resolution requires more processing time than printing at a low resolution, printing in color takes longer than printing in black-and-white because the volume of data in a color image is much greater. For this reason, it is important to be selective in your use of color printing if you also require a fast print speed.

However, even if your image requires the highest resolution and extensive use of color — for example, when you are printing a camera-ready composite that includes color photographs — it may still be possible to optimize the print speed by adjusting other printing conditions. Keep in mind that changing some conditions to increase the print speed may also lower print quality.

The following table shows the factors that inversely affect print speed and print quality (increasing one will decrease the other).

Print quality Print speed		Lower Faster	Higher Slower	Printer driver menu
Printer driver settings	Enhance Fine Details	Off	On	Main menu (Windows), Print dialog box (Macintosh)
Data characteristics	Image size	Small	Large	-
Data characteristics	Resolution	Low	High	-

The table below shows the factors related to print speed only.

Print speed		Faster	Slower	Printer driver menu
Printer driver settings	Orientation	Portrait	Landscape	Main menu (Windows), Page Setup dialog box (Macintosh)
	Black & White, Sepia	Off	On	Main menu (Windows), Print dialog box (Macintosh)
	Auto Correction	Off	On	Main menu (Windows), Page Print dialog box (Macintosh)
Hardware resources	System speed	Faster	Slower	-
	Free hard disk space	Large	Small
	Available memory	Large	Small
Software status	Running applications	One	Many	-

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Using the Speed & Progress dialog box (Windows only)

You can make certain print speed settings in the Speed & Progress dialog box. Click the Speed & Progress button on your printer driver's Maintenance menu. The following dialog box appears.

The available settings that are related to print speed are as follows:

High Speed Copies

To print multiple copies of your image faster, select High Speed Copies. This speeds up printing by using your hard disk space as a cache when printing multiple copies of your image.

Page Rendering Mode (Windows XP and 2000)

Select this checkbox when the print speed is extremely slow or when the print head stops for a few minutes while printing.

Note:

When using this function, the following problems may occur:

Print progress displayed in the Progress Meter window may differ from the actual print progress.

Printing may take a longer time to start.

Print as Bitmap (Windows XP and 2000)

Select this checkbox when the print speed is extremely slow or when the print head stops for a few minutes while printing. Try this option if Always spool RAW datatype and Page Rendering Mode do not solve the problem.

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