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Increasing the Print Speed

General tips
Selecting Speed & Progress Settings (for Windows only)

Follow the instructions in this section to select settings that increase the print speed.

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 larger. 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 print settings and changing the operating environment. Keep in mind that some settings that increase the print speed may also lower print quality.

The following table lists the factors that affect print speed and print quality.

Print quality
Print speed

Lower
Faster

Higher
Slower

Printer settings

Paper & Quality Options
(Windows),
Print Quality (Macintosh)*

Fast Economy, Economy, Normal, Draft

Fine, Photo, Photo RPM

High Speed

On

Off

Image characteristics

Image size

Small

Large

Resolution

Low

High

* Varies depending on the media type.

The table below lists the factors affecting print speed only.

Print speed

Faster

Slower

Printer settings

Orientation

Portrait

Landscape

Grayscale

On

Off

Mirror Image*

Off

On

Edge smoothing*

Off

On

PhotoEnhance

Off

On

Collate*

Off

On

Reverse Order*

Off

On

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 driver and application.

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Selecting Speed & Progress Settings (for Windows only)

You can increase print speed by selecting certain settings in the Speed & Progress window. Click the Speed & Progress button on your printer driver’s Maintenance window.

The following screen appears.

The table below lists the factors affecting print speed.

Print speed

Faster

Slower

High Speed Copies

On

Off

Always spool RAW datatype (Windows XP and 2000)

On

Off

Page Rendering Mode (Windows XP and 2000)

On

Off

Print as Bitmap (Windows XP and 2000)

On

Off

For more details on each item, see the online help.

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