Other Information

# Increasing the Print Speed

> General tips
> Using the Speed & Progress dialog box (Windows only)

Follow the instructions in this section to increase the print speed of your printer.

## 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 greater. 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 printing conditions. Keep in mind that changing some conditions to increase the print speed may also lower print quality.

The following table shows the factors that inversely affect print speed and print quality (increasing one will decrease the other).

Print quality Print speed | Lower Faster | Higher Slower | Printer software menu
Printer software settings | Paper & Quality Options (Windows), Print Quality (Macintosh) | Economy, Normal | Photo | Advanced dialog box
High Speed | On | Off
Data characteristics | Image size | Small | Large | -
Resolution | Low | High

The table below shows the factors related to print speed only.

Print speed | Faster | Slower | Printer software menu
Printer software settings | Orientation | Portrait | Landscape | Main menu (Windows), Page Setup dialog box (Macintosh)
Grayscale | On | Off | Advanced dialog box, Main menu (Windows)
Color** | Grayscale | Color | Print dialog box (Macintosh)
Mirror Image* | Off | On | Advanced dialog box
Edge smoothing* | Off | On | Advanced dialog box
Photo Enhance | Off | On | Advanced dialog box, Main menu (Windows), Print dialog box (Macintosh)
Collate* | Off | On | Page Layout menu (Windows), Layout dialog box (Macintosh)
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 being used.

| ** Varies depending on the media type printed on.

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## Using the Speed & Progress dialog box (Windows only)

You can make certain print speed settings in the Speed & Progress dialog box. Click the Speed & Progress button on your printer software's Maintenance menu. The following dialog box appears.

The available settings that are related to print speed are as follows:

### 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 your document.

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