Ron Johnson <ron.l.johnson@cox.net> writes: > helices wrote: >> * Roger Leigh <rleigh@whinlatter.ukfsn.org> >> [2006:07:09:10:18:09+0100] scribed: <snip /> >> >>> With such a printer, it's quite common for the page rendering >>> it to be CPU bound when printing at a high resolution. A >>> single page could easily weigh in at over 500 MiB of print >>> data. >> >> HP XW9300, dual Opteron, 2.4GHz, 6GB PC3200/DDR400 RAM ... > > Sweet system you've got there, but he's (probably) talking about the > CPU on the printer. No, I really do mean the system CPU. Most modern inkjets do not have much intelligence other than some RAM to cache the input for weaving each pass. They even cut out the ESC/P2 control language seen on earlier models in favour of ESC/P2 raster--just the bare minimum to feed it raster print data. The host is taking the raster output of ghostscript, and then doing all the colour correction, dithering, weaving etc. on the host. It's a lot of work, and even a system with this spec will take a good few tens of seconds of CPU time to render a whole page at its highest quality (this is what Gutenprint does). When printing high quality photographs, I've seen a 2 GiB print job for an A3 page. That's a lot of data to generate, and it does eat your CPU. > (Or am I so old that all I remember are laser printers with more RAM > than the host PCs?) :) It appears to have reversed now; my laser came with a paltry 8 MiB, upgradable to 64. -- .''`. Roger Leigh : :' : Debian GNU/Linux http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/ `. `' Printing on GNU/Linux? http://gutenprint.sourceforge.net/ `- GPG Public Key: 0x25BFB848 Please sign and encrypt your mail.
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