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Printer Performance

One of the most significant performance factors is the speed of the processor. This is especially true for printers used in graphic-intensive environments. The faster the processor, the faster the graphic image can be processed and printed. Obviously, you should look for printers with fast processors, yet just comparing MHz is not enough. To really determine the best performance of several printers, you need to print a number of typical print jobs using your production network.

The second factor that affects performance is a printer's network interface. As with other network devices, network printers will yield different levels of performance, depending on the quality of the embedded network logic. An obvious solution is to adopt high-speed interface methods, such as 100-Mbps Ethernet. However, you may might want to consider looking at 10/100-Mbps Ethernet adapters if you plan to go to 100 Mbps for your local network within the next 12 months. While printers will not be able to handle print data as fast as they can receive data at 100 Mbps, having this capability allows these devices to remain on the same network as the users.

Another way to get an increase in performance is to utilize an attached hard disk. This lets the printer store fonts, macros, forms and other data on a non-volatile storage medium. While you can download fonts, macros and the like to the printer's memory, when you reboot or reset the printer, these elements will be lost. By downloading them to the hard disk, they are always available. This has a direct impact on printing performance. By eliminating the need to constantly transfer these elements to the printer over the network for each user, each time they print, you can substantially reduce network traffic. When shopping for a printer that supports an attached hard disk, also ask about the cost of upgrading or replacing the disk. Some vendors significantly raise the price of a replacement hard disk over its actual replacement cost.

One factor that is often overlooked when trying to increase performance is the client print driver. Testing has shown that a poorly written driver can significantly degrade print performance. Vendors update their print drivers periodically and make them available on the Internet. So it makes sense to keep a watchful eye on these drivers, downloading new versions when they become available. In addition, some of these newer print drivers support compression, which can further reduce the amount of traffic on the network. For small documents, the compression will have little impact, but for those megabyte -sized presentations or drawings, compression will help. Even with compression, you should verify that the printer is able to print multiple copies of a document without having to send each copy of the print job over the network. Thus, if you are printing a 10-MB print job and are printing 10 copies, you only want 10 MB of data going over the network and not 100 MB (10 copies @ 10 MB each).

While the speed of a specific printer is important, you can also gain increases in performance by deploying several smaller printers rather than relying upon one large printer. It is preferable to deploy several printers rather than a single printer to eliminate a single point of failure. If your only printer jams or breaks, your users will have to locate a printer somewhere else or await assistance.