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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 document 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 document 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. For example, we recommend using a USB 2.0 cable with an IEEE 1394 port to gain the highest rates of data transfer. 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 software menu
Printer software settings	Paper & Quality Options (Windows), Print Quality (Macintosh)	Economy, Normal	Photo	Advanced dialog box
Printer software settings	High Speed	On	Off	Advanced dialog box
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 software menu
Printer software settings	Orientation	Portrait	Landscape	Main menu (Windows), Page Setup dialog box (Macintosh)
	Grayscale	On	Off	Advanced dialog box, Main menu (Windows)
	Color**	Grayscale	Color	Print dialog box (Macintosh)
	Mirror Image*	Off	On	Advanced dialog box
	Edge smoothing*	Off	On	Advanced dialog box
	Photo Enhance	Off	On	Advanced dialog box, Main menu (Windows), Print dialog box (Macintosh)
	Collate*	Off	On	Page Layout menu (Windows), Layout dialog box (Macintosh)
	Reverse Order*	Off	On	Page Layout menu (Windows), Layout 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	-

* Varies depending on the printer software and application being used.

** Varies depending on the media type printed on.

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

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