How much Bandwidth a printer need??

[iwodo]

I have a friend who just said to me saying why not many printer use USB 2.0?? Then it will be faster.......

Today i sat down and think, USB 1.1 already provide 12Mbit /s ..... although it is onlt theoritical, may be in real world it is only 8-10 Mbit/s............ that is Still 1Mb /s.

Most home user print black and white files and less than 1Mb, even though if it was a colour photo that is more than 1Mb, most home uses printer don't even have more than 1 Mb of internal memory. Therefore transfer the file faster wouldn't really help. Am i correct??

 

[MDE]

Most printers don't use internal memory, they use the system memory and transfer the data as they print. Most home printers can't print this fast, so USB 2.0 is an added expense that doesn't provide anything.

 

[ShawnD1]

Your buddy is on crack. I still use the parallel port for my printing. It doesn't need to send much data to print. USB is faster than parallel definitely but comparing USB 1.1 to 2.0 is just silly. Using 2.0 instead of 1.1 might save you a quarter of a second; that's so worth wasting a 2.0 slot

 

[modedepe]

I don't think more bandwidth would really help. For plain text black and white files they're usually pretty small, so more wouldn't help there. And for things such as high resolution pictures I think the problem is mostly just the printers are slow at printing, not they are being limited by not getting enough data.

 

[iwodo]

so a printer using USB ( version number doesn't matter ) is good because it is faster than paralle and Plug and Play.

And my theory ( or thought or common sense ^_^ ) is correct that USB 2.0 is nothing more than USB 1.1 in Home uses printer.

 

[OverVolt]

Yes!!! same here! Parallel is the best for printing!

 

[cmdrdredd]

I like my gigabit ethernet for my network color laser printer with 128MB memory. This is for super large Photoshop uncompressed image printing for the graphics buisness.

 

[zephyrprime]

Most home user print black and white files and less than 1Mb, even though if it was a colour photo that is more than 1Mb, most home uses printer don't even have more than 1 Mb of internal memory. Therefore transfer the file faster wouldn't really help. Am i correct??

But isn't that file size only the size of the spool file and not the size of the data sent to the printer? Printers without their own RAM and processor rely upon the PC to perform the scaling and rasterazation of anything that needs to be printed. So a full page on a 1200dpi 4 color inkjet would require 538 megabits of data to be transmitted which can be done in about 54 seconds on USB. But maybe printers use some compression which could reduce this significantly.

 

[Macro2]

"so a printer using USB ( version number doesn't matter ) is good because it is faster than parallel"

USB is not necessarily faster than parallel.

USB is a little easier to plug in, smaller and the cables are less though. Go USB if possible. Some newer printers don't even have a parallel port.

 

[Macro2]

RE:"But isn't that file size only the size of the spool file and not the size of the data sent to the printer? Printers without their own RAM and processor rely upon the PC to perform the scaling and rasterazation of anything that needs to be printed. So a full page on a 1200dpi 4 color inkjet would require 538 megabits of data to be transmitted which can be done in about 54 seconds on USB. But maybe printers use some compression which could reduce this significantly."


Actually the spooling is dependent on the OS. For instance Win 98 sends the data to the printer differently than Win XP.

Mac

 

[ShawnD1]

Originally posted by: Macro2

USB is not necessarily faster than parallel.

Explain? Parallel is only 0.5mb/s, slow USB is like 12mb/s.

 

[Paulson]

That's why I avoid the whole usb/parrallel thing... my hp laserjet 4 plus has built in lan

granted it's only 10mbit which is about as fast as usb... but still.. at least I don't have to have a computer running to use it...

 

[ShawnD1]

Your computer can print without a computer asking it to? Whoa!