Digital BW, The Print

Chris,

Not sure that your image will reside entirely in RAM. Don't forget that the 
PS scratch file is PS's virtual memory; I think you will find that it swaps 
stuff in and out of the scratch disk all the time, just as Windows does with 
its pagefile.

When you click on print, Photoshop has to convert the image file from your 
working space to the printer space (or send it to the printer driver to do 
that). Then the printer driver has to upsample the image to the ppi that it 
works with internally, and then turn it into the CMYK info for printing dots 
of the requisite colors. When that is all done, the resulting file is sent 
(spooled) to the location specified in the Registry (on your system disk if 
you haven't changed it). Then you get back PS for further work. So I guess 
that it is largely processor and RAM dependant, unless you have very slow 
hard disks, or your pagefile, scratch file, and printerspool file are all on 
the same hard disk (when the heads will be whizzing back and forth between 
these). Put at least some of these on separate disks and they can all be 
doing different things at more or less the same time, thus speeding things 
up a lot.

You must have 2GB of RAM for maximum speed; more is not a lot of use since 
PS can only handle 2GB. Any more is only available to other programs or 
windows. And fast RAM is obviously better than slow RAM. A Processor/RAM 
combination that is Dual Channel is faster than ordinary single channel. I 
have a 2.8 P4 processor which handles 2 GB of PC3200 DDR memory in dual 
channel mode. That gives me back PS in pretty quick time; not instant, but 
no hanging about. The 2.8 Northwood P4 is probably best buy at the moment in 
terms of cost/speed.

I have MSI and Abit motherboards and both these have utilities on their 
installation CDs that display processor temp, case temp, fan speeds, 
voltages, etc, with warning limits for all of these, so that if a fan fails, 
or a processor goes over temp, you get a warning, and in extreme cases it 
will turn off the computer to prevent cooking the processor.

Hope this helps,

Bob Frost.

----- Original Message ----- 

From: "chris" <cjones@...>
To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>

Given that an image file resides entirely in Ram, what determines the length
of time required to send it to the printer-is it processor, or disk speed,
or what? When I hit the print button, I seem to sit and wait a long time for
the image to spool out before I have PS back.

 How do you measure processor temp?