How much Bandwidth a printer need??

iwodo

Member
Jan 24, 2001
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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

Lifer
Jul 17, 2003
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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

Lifer
May 24, 2003
15,987
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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
rolleye.gif
 

modedepe

Diamond Member
May 11, 2003
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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

Member
Jan 24, 2001
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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.
 

cmdrdredd

Lifer
Dec 12, 2001
27,052
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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

Diamond Member
Feb 18, 2001
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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

Diamond Member
May 20, 2000
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"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

Diamond Member
May 20, 2000
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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
 

Paulson

Elite Member
Feb 27, 2001
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www.ifixidevices.com
That's why I avoid the whole usb/parrallel thing... my hp laserjet 4 plus has built in lan :D

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...