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Large format printer with gigabit ethernet


Christiaan

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Never going to get a printer to physically print as fast as the information sent to it. Got to be processed somewhere.

It's not so much the sending I would have thought but the processing that's the bottleneck.

At a previous company which had large format we had a seperate machine,server, with a RIP and all jobs were sent,processed, etc. on this leaving the individual workstation machines free for other work.

Connecting a printer even with Gigabit ethernet into your network isn't going to get your jobs printed any quicker by its ethernet connection speed alone.

Alan

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Yeah I'm just researching things at this point Alan. From my experience we wait more often for prints to spool than to be processed. I would have thought a gigabit connection would facilate faster spooling.

With regard to using a separate machine as a print server I've also been trying to set up that up too but it's nightmare on Mac OS X Server. Waiting for the next major update.

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Hi Christiaan

No problem. The spooling of course is done by the computer and the file processing, the only thing the printer does is receive the information in a series of commands to control its heads and paper feed.

It's been a while since I was involved in all this but built into the printer would be a buffer to ensure the data was held from the server in the printer. This in our machine was small and this leads me to my opinion that regardless of the connection the data coming from the server could easily swamp the printers capability hence the buffer and nothing more than a 100 base is needed.

Sure from your workstation to server will benefit from gigabit connection, and that probably is in place if you have G5's etc.

I'd be inclined to call in somebody to give you help and advice on this, lay out what you need to achieve and ask them to quote on a solution.

Good luck.

Alan

Edited by alanmac
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Christiaan,

We use an older G4 (933 Silver) running OSX.4 (not X Server) as a print server. It has 2mb ram and an 80gb drive. It has no other duties besides keeping the 9800 and 4800 busy. Once in a while it seems to bog down when the two print queques happen to start a new job at the same time, but otherwise it requires the least attention of our whole network. Occasionally it will hang and require a restart, but that's pretty rare. It does happen to be Gigabit-capable, but before it we used an even older G4 that wasn't. Don't know that I can tell the difference.

I'm curious what problems you might be having?

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