New -
Faster Version 9.0 Printer Drivers Released!
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In our continuous effort to
satisfy our customers, Black Ice Software
strove to increase the speed of the printer
drivers and was successful. The Black Ice
printer drivers support both RAW and EMF
datatypes, and the performance of the driver
using both datatypes has been increased.
The printing
tests referred to in this article were
performed on a Pentium 4, 1.6 GHz machine,
512 MB Ram, and at least 3 GB free space on
the system drive. |
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The printed document was
a 50 page Word 2003 document, each page containing
text, clip-art and an inserted image.
The chart above shows
the printing speed in seconds, measured with the
ColorPlus printer driver version 8.76 versus the new
version 9.0.
As displayed in the
chart, the performance of the driver using the RAW
data type increased with an average of 26.3% when
printing with the above specified settings. The
printing using the EMF datatype was improved by 14.5
%. Since the printing speed depends on the printed
document, even better results may be obtained
depending on the files being printed.
Dithering methods
Most Black Ice customers
are using monochrome (1 bit) file formats such as
TIFF G3D1, 1 bit PDF, etc. On Windows operating
systems, every document is printed by the printing
application as a 24 bit color document. In order to
convert the final image to a 1 bit image, the Black
Ice printer driver can use one of the following
dithering algorithms:
Different dithering
methods will produce different results, in quality
as well as in file size. The printing time depends
on a variety of factors, including the dithering
algorithm selected in the File Formats tab of the
Black Ice printer driver settings. The test below
was performed on a 400 MHz machine by printing 20
pages from a Word document containing text,
clip-arts and images.
The fastest printing
results are obtained using the “Disable Photo
Quality” option which beats all other dithering
methods by 400%. If you are printing text only
documents or simple drawings such as architect
design worksheets, this method will provide a good
image, however if your document contains clipart,
the quality of the image generated using “Disable
Photo Quality” option might be insufficient. Since
the quality of the final image depends on the
printed document itself in addition to the selected
dithering method, Black Ice recommends trying all of
the dithering methods to see which one produces the
best results in your particular case.
The conversion speed
also depends on the resolution of the image, if a
lower resolution is used the image will be generated
faster. When using 600x600 DPI the Disable Photo
Quality method is 9.5 times faster than using Smooth
dithering, however when using 204x196 (fax ) DPI the
Smooth dithering takes only 3 times longer than the
Disable Photo Quality option.
Printing speed affected by the output file type
The Black Ice printer
drivers can convert everyday documents such as Word,
Excel, PDF, HTML, etc into several popular image
formats, including TIFF Group 3 D1, TIFF Group 4,
JPEG, BMP, PNG, PDF, etc. Printing the same document
to different file formats will produce different
results in the speed of the printing. Some file
formats such as BMP, do not require heavy processing
power and the image can be encoded faster, however
other file formats such as TIFF Group 4 require more
processing power in order to create a compressed
image.
The chart below shows
the time in seconds used by the Black Ice ColorPlus
printer driver version 9.0 to print the same 20 page
document, using 1 bit and Floyd Steinberg dithering,
and saving the image in different file formats.
The chart below shows
the printing speed for 24 bit color images, saved in
different file formats.
As you can see
generating a PDF file using Flate compression and
the PNG file formats are slower than others, however
the size of the final file is substantially smaller.
If the file size is a bigger issue than the printing
speed Black Ice recommends using one of the higher
compressed file formats. Again, the actual settings
you use depends on which factors are most important
for your application.
