Digital BW, The Print

Brian, Steve, Gareth,


  >Thank you too, Brian, for your comprehensive advice - I suspect this 
  >will interest many list members.  I have kept a copy of what you have 
  >posted, but which I did not see until this morning at work.  I did 
  >not try the other printers but will do so tonight.  Assuming they are 
  >all working I shall probably leave well alone until the Gods do me 
  >down again. (Is this because I live in Greece and can see Olympus on 
  >a clear day from my lounge!)

  Thanks, I hope this is useful. 

  I don't recommend running 26 printers off one computer. But knowing it can be done and how to manage it is useful. At one point they had all of them on ONE USB port(!) They later split the system into 4 pieces to make trouble shooting easier.

  Leaving well enough alone is good. Why invite other unforeseen problems?

  >Awhile back I installed a PCI card with USB 2.  In real life, will 
  >using this enable materially faster printing than using the USB 1.1. 
  >socket to which the printers are currently connected?

  >Thanks again for all your help.

  >Colin

  My PC magazine tested the difference and found it to be about 5% for printers. I upgraded my computer and found that to be fairly close. There is another difference, which is that the much greater speed means that your computer will spend much less time feeding bits to your printer, so it will be more responsive if you are doing something else processor intensive while printing, like editing your next image. 
  Where you will see it the most is during scanning. Again, the mavens at PC Mag found up to a 500% difference. The higher resolution you scan and the bigger the image, the more difference you will see, though I have found it quite noticeable on 4x6s at 600 dpi. 



[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

--- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "BRIAN MAYTUM" 
<bmaytum2000@m...> wrote:

> 
>   My PC magazine tested the difference and found it to be about 5% 
for printers. I upgraded my computer and found that to be fairly 
close. There is another difference, which is that the much greater 
speed means that your computer will spend much less time feeding bits 
to your printer, so it will be more responsive if you are doing 
something else processor intensive while printing, like editing your 
next image. 

Thanks, I will keep the printers on USB1.1 as I have the printing set 
to lock the PC until the spool is written and printing started, after 
which I regain control of the PC(correction - no I never have control 
of my PC... butsometimes it allows me acces?!).  I can't remember how 
I did this.

>   Where you will see it the most is during scanning. 

I removed my scanners from the desktop and have them run from a 
notebook saving to external HDD on USB2.  I then link that HDD to the 
USB 2.2 on my desktop PC for file transfer. 

I really appreciated your advice, thanks.

Colin