Duplex printer advice

Christopher Sean Hilton chris at vindaloo.com
Wed Jun 4 00:39:27 UTC 2008


On Jun 2, 2008, at 5:31 PM, Wojciech Puchar wrote:

>> Color laser is what you want.  There are some really
>> good inexpensive units out there.  I recall reading the
>> inexpensieve Samsung color laser even speaks Postscript.
>
> while i don't use color printers, usually this postscript is  
> disadventage. if there is a choice like in HP laserjets - switching  
> to PCL and using ghostscript works MUCH faster giving same results.
>
> your computer's CPU is much faster than printer's.

Usually your computer has more available memory than your printer. In  
fact usually your printer's memory bound. I have two printers an HP  
Business Inkjet 2250 with 80MB of RAM and an HP Laserjet 4000 with  
64MB of RAM. The Business Inkjet prints Postscript at 12+ pages a  
minute. The 4000 does 17+ pages of postscript / minute. These speeds  
are pretty much as fast as the respective printers can spit out pages.  
Factory stock memory for the Inkjet is 16MB and it 4MB for the laser.  
With stock memory the inkjet does 7 pages / minute max and the  
Laserjet might make 12. Optimizing a CPU for Postscript isn't all that  
hard but for some reason the printer manufacturers ship these machines  
with very low RAM. BTW The RAM in these machines was scavenged out of  
some long dead laptop.


-- Chris  


Chris Hilton                                   e: chris|at|vindaloo| 
dot|com
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                   "The pattern juggler lifts his hand; The orchestra  
begin.
       As slowly turns the grinding wheel in the court of the crimson  
king."
                                            -- Ian McDonald / Peter  
Sinfield





More information about the freebsd-questions mailing list