How to

Increasing the Print Speed

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

Follow the instructions in this section to increase the printing 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 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. 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

Print Quality

Economy, Normal

Photo

Advanced dialog box

High Speed

On

Off

Finest Detail

Off

On

Data characteristics

Image size

Small

Large

Resolution

Low

High

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

Print speed

Faster

Slower

Printer software menu

Printer software settings

Ink

Black

Color

Advanced dialog box, Main menu

Flip Horizontal*

Off

On

Advanced dialog box

Edge smoothing*

Off

On

Advanced dialog box

Collate*

Off

On

Paper menu

Reverse Order*

Off

On

Data characteristics

Variety of colors

Grayscale**

Full color

Hardware resources

System speed

Faster

Slower

Memory free space

Large

Small

Software status

Running applications

One

Many

*  Varies depending on the printer software and application that you are using.
**  Grayscale means using black ink only to print varying shades of gray, ranging from pure black to pure white.


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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 Utility 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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