What does adding memory to a laser printer do

[GoldenBear]

?

 

[Ronstang]

A laser printer needs to create the entire image of the page to be printed in it's own memory buffer before it can print so the more memory the printer has the more complex a page can be. If the graphics to be printed on a page are very complex it can require several megs to render the page properly. Also, more memory allows more fonts to be used per page.

 

[rhinox99]

Ronstang: does it speed up printing at all?

 

[Cosmic_Horror]

i think it frees up the printer server or the the computer you are printing from.
If the printer can't cache all the data that it needs to print then it can help a bit.
How much ram does your laser printer have and how much did you want to add?

 

[Tsaico]

as far as standard text printing is concerned, no. Adding more ram will not speed things up. But if you do things in adobe, quark, or similar products, then you should notice a good jump in speed. And I agree with the others about what they had added.

 

[Ronstang]

More printer memory will have no affect on the print server, a laser printer HAS to have the whole page in it's personal memory before it can print, if it doesn't then it will only print as much of the page as it can store in it's memory. My old Canon LBP4 was bad about this. It only came with 512K of memory and if I tried to print an Excel spreadsheat with gridlines and lots of formatting the last inch of the page would have "no gridlines" because there was not enough printer memory to store them.

More memory in a laser printer will give you no speed benefit. The speed a of a laser is attributable only to it's processor. More memory gives the printer the ability to print a more complex page...that's all.

 

[GoldenBear]

So what would happen if I tried to print a complex page without a lot of memory?

 

[Dan]

GoldenBear: If you try to print a complex page (like a photo) on a laser without much memory it won't print or will just print a partial image. That happened frequently on our HP Laser III with the standard 1MB memory. I upgraded (maxed it out at 4MB) and haven't had a problem since.

 

[azeker1]

I'm sure Ronstag and some others know a lot more about this than I do, but we did indeed see a speed increase in printing graphics (from Corel, Adobe, etc.) on the old Apple Laserwriter in my lab.

 

[office boy]

or if you have an NEC, it will try and commpress the image, and then you will be all F'ed up. (NEC lasers SUCK)