Sunday 26 July 2009

Oh Brother!

Last month I blogged about my Brother 2170W laser printer. So far it has been a totally reliable monochrome laser printer. We just keep on feeding A4 paper and it keeps on printing. It works really well with Ubuntu Intrepid, Jaunty and Karmic Alpha 3.

However, it has one downside. It's really slow at handling fairly large graphic images. Today we wanted to print out the maps of Ashdown forest from a PDF (~6MB of data) and after 20 minutes we gave up waiting and killed the print job. Initially the data zipped over to the printer, then it slowed down to ~30K/s and chugged on and on and on... Zzzzzz.

My quick workaround was open the PDF in GIMP and print it out as a smaller 1.5MB JPG and it printed out within 3 minutes. Even so, that's fairly slow. I suspect the 32MB buffer is a teeny bit too small for intensive graphic prints.

However, I shouldn't gripe too much. I bought this printer as a general text printer and for this it does very well. I had read in reviews that it was slow on intensive graphic printing, and this is indeed true, but for 95% of my printing it's fast enough for my requirements.

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