Slow or Stalling Printing.

Printer Services Newsletter 8.1

Slow or Stalling Printing.

Last time we visited this topic we covered the different network related settings and options that effect the speed at which your print jobs get to the machine. Now is the time to look at what can be changed to increase the speed of printing out your jobs.

Printer settings.

You have the right driver, the printer connection is fully setup, but you’re still have problems with the machine processing and printing slow. Here are some options that you can look at in the drivers and on the machine to see if you can speed up those pesky print jobs.

Printer Languages.

Some printers will give you the option of multiply printer languages whether being a separate driver or being able to choose different language within the same driver. For example, the Fuji Xerox comes with two separate drivers one being PCL and the other Postscript. A Kyocera on the other hand has both PCL and Postscript printer language all in one driver which you can manually adjust. The speed will differ between languages depending on the item you are trying to print so one is not necessarily faster than the other. Please keep in mind if you are printing complex graphic files the postscript driver will do a better job being language for printing graphics, compare to the PCL driver which is a language for printing documents.

Print as image in PDFs.

Printing a PDF as image can increase speeds as the image is pre-flattened changing the way rendering is performed in the printer which can increase speed and will give you a more accurate result. This setting is found when you go to "Print" and then under "Advanced" and check the "Print As Image" box.

Perception of printing speed.

It must be noted that sometimes when a machine is printing slowly it isn’t always because there is a problem with the machine or it's set up. The follow two examples will have the machine printing slowly but for very deliberate reasons and are all part of the way the machine prints these types of jobs.

Paper weight.

Heavy paper weights will print slower than plain paper, labels are also slower to print. This is because the printer's fuser unit requires to maintain its temperature as the thicker paper absorbs more heat.