Before you examine printing speed, ask yourself how fast do you need the inkjet & laserjet printer to go. Many factors can influence the speed you need. One person may use a printer very infrequently. Another person may print a great deal, yet both people may be doing the same job. The fundamental question is: "When will a faster printer enable you to do your job more efficiently and productively?" But, an equally important question is: "When does a faster printer encourage waste?" In fact, a faster printer may make you more inefficient. For example, with a slower printer you are encouraged to find some-thing else to do while waiting for the printout. Yet, with a faster printer you may be inclined to watch the process. If the printer is too fast, people tend to turn the printer into an expensive duplicating machine.
Certain applications will always require a high-speed printer.
Suppose that you need the printer to make a paper copy of
a massive inventory to be used only if the computer stops
working. This would require a fast printer and tractor-feed
paper. Font quality would be a secondary issue. Printing
speed may be very important in this case, because it could
mean the difference between finishing the job at 10 p.m.
and finishing the job at 2 a.m.
What good is a special high-speed printer if it needs a
babysitter because the paper tray does not hold many sheets
or because the paper always jams? What good is a fast expensive
printer if the output is so unreadable that it will never
be used? How often is draft mode ever used anyway? How many
people always print in letter-quality mode (the slowest
mode), hoping that the printout will be correct the first
time? Is a LAN always best served by the fastest, highest
quality printer around? When are the employees better off
with two slow-speed printers (one for documents and one
for mailing labels) than one high-speed printer?
The point of the preceding speed discussion was to show
you that faster is not always better. You can find the optimal
speed best by looking at the users involved, the job requirements,
and the turnaround time required with the appropriate failure
recover margins built in. But, suppose that the time required
to print a specific document has been calculated. For example,
sup-pose that the page has to appear in the amount of time
it takes to shove a chair away from a desk, stand up and
lean over the printer three seconds. How fast does the printer
have to be in order to produce a page in three seconds?
A printer's speed in the past has been measured in characters
per second, lines per minute, or pages per minute. But,
often these measures of speed have little relationship to
how fast paper comes out of the printer. Before you develop
a speed rating of a printer, you must identify the slowest
part of the printing system. This is usually called the
bottleneck. Often, this has nothing to do with characters
per second, lines per minute, or pages per minute. For example,
suppose that the printer is 300 feet away from the computer.
This means that the data transfer rate has to be lowered.
And perhaps the cable may turn into the bottleneck.
The various modes in which you operate a printer can have
a big effect on printer speed and the location of the bottleneck.
In character mode, some feature of the printer is usually
the bottleneck. In graphics mode, the printer or even the
PC is the bottleneck. In object mode, the printer's CPU
is the bottleneck, rather than something mechanical. The
following paragraphs explore these issues in more detail.
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In the links below you will find pages that lists other
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Ink
& Toner, Shredders | Ink
& Toner, Shredders ( ink toners additional 1) | Ink
& Toner, Shredders (additional 2) | Computers
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Scanners | Printers,
Scanners (additionals) | Printers,
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