| Home > Troubleshooting Increasing the Print Speed General tips Selecting Speed & Progress Settings (Windows) Follow the instructions in this section to select settings that increase the print speed. 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 larger. For this reason, it is important to be selective in your use of color printing 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 print settings and changing the operating environment. Keep in mind that some settings that increase the print speed may also lower print quality. The following table lists the factors that affect print speed and print quality.
Print quality Print speed | Lower Faster | Higher Slower
Printer settings | Paper & Quality Options (Windows), Print Quality (Macintosh) | Economy, Normal | Photo
High Speed | On | Off
Image characteristics | Image size | Small | Large
Resolution | Low | High
The table below lists the factors affecting print speed only.
Print speed | Faster | Slower
Printer settings | Orientation | Portrait | Landscape
Grayscale | On | Off
Color** | Grayscale | Color
Mirror Image* | Off | On
Edge smoothing* | Off | On
Photo Enhance | Off | On
Fast Feed* | On | Off
Collate* | Off | On
Reverse Order* | Off | On
Hardware resources | System speed | Faster | Slower
Free hard disk space | Large | Small
Available memory | Large | Small
Software status | Running applications | One | Many
* Varies depending on the printer software and application. ** Varies depending on the media type. Top Selecting Speed & Progress Settings (Windows) You can increase print speed by selecting certain settings in the Speed & Progress window. Click the Speed & Progress button on your printer software’s Maintenance window. The following screen appears. 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 a 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 (Windows XP and 2000) Select the Always spool RAW datatype 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). You can also use this option if documents spooled in EMF format do not print correctly or if you have insufficient memory or disk space problems.
| Note:
When spooling RAW datatype, print progress displayed by the Progress Meter may differ from the actual print progress.
Page Rendering Mode (Windows XP and 2000) Select this check box when the print speed is extremely slow or when the print head stops for a few minutes while printing.
| Note:
When using this function, the following problems may occur: Print progress displayed in the Progress Meter window may differ from the actual print progress. Printing may take a longer time to start.
Print as Bitmap (Windows XP and 2000) Select this check box when the print speed is extremely slow or when the print head stops for a few minutes while printing. Try this option if Always spool RAW datatype and Page Rendering Mode do not solve the problem. Monitoring Preferences You can change settings for EPSON Status Monitor 3 in the Monitoring Preferences window. Right-click the shortcut icon on the taskbar, then select Monitoring Preferences. You can select the settings listed in the table below:
Select Notification | Displays the current error notification settings. Select the check boxes for the error types for which you want to receive notification. Click the Default button to revert all Select Notification settings to their defaults.
Select Shortcut Icon | To have a shortcut icon placed on your Windows taskbar, select the Shortcut Icon check box and choose an icon. You can click the shortcut icon 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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