[PLUG] Printing speeds

[Anthony Schlemmer]

>From looking at some of the Ghostscript device information it may be 
slow as it looks to me that the Postscript in converted to bitmap not 
PCL for the Laserjet 5. Maybe I'm not reading this correctly? I have an 
HP 4P which is PCL only and does 4 pages per minute with the 
Ghostscript "ljet4" driver.

http://www.gnu.org/software/ghostscript/devices.html

I agree that having a Postscript printer is the way to go. I've had the 
HP 4P for nearly 8 years and I can't yet justify buying a new printer 
until my HP dies or it's too expensive to fix. I only seem to be 
averaging about 1000 pages a year on the thing and so far the only 
expense has been toner cartridges and paper.

I did get a Lexmark color printer that has a Postscript engine in 
hardware so I would be assured I had a color printer that worked with 
both Windows and Linux. I also have a Lexmark Z11 that is supposed to 
be partially supported under Linux but when I tried it all I got was a 
bunch of "gibberish" on the paper so I've given up on that printer.

Tony

On Thursday 15 August 2002 08:54 am, Rich Shepard wrote:
> On Thu, 15 Aug 2002, Anthony Schlemmer wrote:
> > Have you looked at the Linux printer website? Here's the list of HP
> > printers. I don't know which Laserjet 5 printer you have but it
> > talks about some of the drivers being "slow".
>
>   Thanks, Tony. I've not looked there for several years; not since I
> researched a tabloid-size color inkjet that would work with linux.
>
>   The CUPS drivers work OK. I think the delay is having ghostscript
> translate from PostScript to HP's PCL. I see the display say
> "PROCESSING JOB", and a page or two comes out, then it thinks again
> before the next couple of pages print.
>
>   Anyway, I ordered the PostScript SIMM and I'll put that in when it
> arrives. That should eliminate the translation step and bring the
> speed back up. While this is now an "orphaned" model because the
> company is pushing its latest and greatest. But, at 12 ppm, it's
> quite adequate for me. A couple of years ago I bought the last
> available duplexing unit I could find anywhere in the country. Now I
> can print double sided and that saves a ton of paper. I expect the
> PostScript module will bring back the speed and then I'll have all
> the printer I'll need for quite some time.
>
> Rich
>
>
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-- 
Anthony Schlemmer
aschlemm at attbi.com
>>>>This machine was last rebooted:  17 days 22:08 hours ago<<