Printing / Other Information

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 this product.

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	Menu or dialog box
Printer software settings	Paper & Quality Options (Windows), Print Quality (Macintosh)	Economy, Fine	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	Menu or dialog box
Printer software settings	Orientation	Portrait	Landscape	Main menu (Windows), Page Setup dialog box (Macintosh)
	Color (Macintosh)***	Black	Color	Print dialog box
	Edge smoothing*	Off	On	Advanced dialog box
	Fast Feed*	On	Off	Advanced dialog box
	Photo Enhance	Off	On	Main menu (Windows), Print dialog box (Macintosh)
	Mirror Image*	Off	On	Page Layout menu (Windows), Advanced 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)
Data characteristics	Variety of colors	Grayscale**	Full color	-
Hardware resources	System speed	Faster	Slower	-
	HDD free space	Large	Small
	Memory free space	Large	Small
Software status	Running applications	One	Many	-
Software status	Virtual memory	Not in use	In use	-

* 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.

*** Varies depending on the media type printed on.

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Using the Speed & Progress dialog box (Windows only)

Windows users 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 settings related to print speed are listed below.

Note:

The specific features available in the printer software vary depending on the product model and the version of Windows that you are using.

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.

Show Progress Meter

To display the Progress Meter every time you print, select Show Progress Meter.

Disable EPSON Status Monitor 3

Select this check box to disable printer status monitoring with EPSON Status Monitor 3.

Always spool RAW datatype (for Windows XP and 2000 only)

Select this check box to have Windows NT-based clients spool documents using the RAW format instead of the EMF (metafile) format (Windows NT-based applications use the EMF format by default).

Try using this option if documents spooled in EMF format do not print correctly.

Spooling RAW datatype requires less resources than EMF, so some problems ("Insufficient memory/disk space to print", "Slow print speed", etc.) can be solved by selecting the Always spool RAW datatype check box.

Note:

When spooling RAW datatype, print progress as displayed by the Progress Meter may differ from actual print progress.

Monitoring Preferences

You can make settings for EPSON Status Monitor 3 in the Monitoring Preferences dialog box. To open the dialog box, right-click the shortcut icon in the taskbar, then select Monitoring Preferences from the menu.

You can make the following settings:

Select Notification

Displays the current error notification settings.

Select the check boxes of the error types for which you want to receive notification.

Note:
Click the Default button to revert all Select Notification settings to their defaults.

Select Shortcut Icon

Select the Shortcut Icon check box and choose an icon type to have a shortcut icon placed in your Windows taskbar. You can click the shortcut icon in the taskbar to open EPSON Status Monitor 3, or right-click the icon to access some of the printer utilities.

Allow monitoring of shared printers

Select this check box to allow monitoring of a shared printer by other computers.

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