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ECP printer cable improve performance?

D

dajo

Senior member
According to HP's documentation, an ECP printer cable is 24 times faster than a parallel printer cable. I'm thinking of getting one for my HP 1170C all-in-one printer but money is tight now.

Anyone done any real testing with ECP vs. parallel or used both and have an opinion? Would I really see any appreciable difference in print times?
 
You are still going to be limited by the speed of the printer which is still much slower than what a standard parallel interface can deliver. The only speed differences I've seen between using standard and an ECP interface is when hooking up 2 computers for file sharing.
 
interesting. never heard of ECP printer cable.

aren't ecp, epp, spp, etc just the different transfer mode? the cable shouldn't be matter.
similar to IDE's pio mode 1 to 4, dma mode 1 to 2, up to ATA33, all use the same plain ide cable.

let's see what the biggest rip-off cable manufacturer - belkin offers:
I can only see IEEE 1284 printer cable and non-IEEE bi-directional printer cable.
No such thing as ECP printer cable.

 
I think ecp is the same as 1284 - don't really know what the others are. Most BIOS implementations have the ECP port selection option.

I scanned a document this morning and the HP utility came up saying that scanning was much faster with an ecp port. I guess that would be one implementation, but since I only scan a document every six weeks or so it isn't worth spending 40 bucks.
 
ECP is the interface type (what your device will support and how you have your BIOS configured). It uses an IEEE-1284 cable.
 
Originally posted by: dajo
I think ecp is the same as 1284 - don't really know what the others are. Most BIOS implementations have the ECP port selection option.

I scanned a document this morning and the HP utility came up saying that scanning was much faster with an ecp port. I guess that would be one implementation, but since I only scan a document every six weeks or so it isn't worth spending 40 bucks.
Click to expand...

You don't need a different cable.

The only thing you need to do is set your printer port to ECP mode in your BIOS.

 
I know you set it up in the BIOS, but are you guys saying that the transfer rate through a standard parallel cable will equal that of a 1284 cable with BIOS ECP enabled?
 
IEEE1284 compliant cables (aka ECP cables) are just complete in their wiring, while cheapo printer cables might not have all the connections. So if your printer still prints when the port is set to ECP in BIOS, buying another cable won't make things any faster or better. It's a go-or-nogo situation, either the cable does the job or doesn't.

regards, Peter
 
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