Postscript on laser digital print centre

The only thing I know about Postscript and printing is that the files are huge text files and every print shop I’ve been to, uses it.

So… I have a little A4 (2300) Minolta printer which does not use Postscript. It prints quickly enough and the output is photographic quality. It suffers from an ever so slight colour cast to blue which I compensate for, before committing to print and it doesn’t do full bleed prints.

I just bought a Magicolor 7300 (SRA3) printer which runs Postscript. The first few prints have surprisingly correct colour and image placement but… The 248 Meg file took 13 minutes before it printed. The time to print only gets worse from here on because that file was an A4 document. When I place 2 of them on a page with full bleed and crop marks… Nearly half an hour to print the first page and this 21 "full colour" pages per minute printer starts churning out 4 pages per minute! Will someone wake me when the 3000 brochures actually get finished! Then maybe I can do the 10,000 business cards and 750 Postcards for the rest of the job!!!

Can anyone with some Postscript knowledge tell me if these long delays in getting data into a printer are commonplace? I’d also like someone to comment on the advertised print speed of 21 pages per minute (A4 speed, I’m told now) as opposed to the actual print speed of 4 pages per minute. Does anyone else use a colour laser in a digital print shop?
It may well be going back to Minolta before the end of the week if they can’t make it perform. It’s on Ethernet, by the way. Photoshop output to this printer is IMHO better than most inkjet printers. My only issue is the God awful speed of the thing!

Cheers,
Doug

3000 brochures, 10,000 business cards, 750 Postcards …
On a DESKTOP PRINTER ?

? ? ? ? ?

Excuse me … but you’re out of your friggin’ mind.

Get to know someone with a real "four color printing press" …
(1) It will be a *lot* cheaper …

(2) It will be a *lot* faster …

(3) It will be a *lot* less hassle …

(4) You will actually survive the ordeal …

RSD99 wrote:

3000 brochures, 10,000 business cards, 750 Postcards …
On a DESKTOP PRINTER ?

? ? ? ? ?

Excuse me … but you’re out of your friggin’ mind.

Get to know someone with a real "four color printing press" …
(1) It will be a *lot* cheaper …

(2) It will be a *lot* faster …

(3) It will be a *lot* less hassle …

(4) You will actually survive the ordeal …

LOL
Just the thought of having 10,000 business cards to cut by hand…
Stephan

Stephan wrote:

RSD99 wrote:

3000 brochures, 10,000 business cards, 750 Postcards …
On a DESKTOP PRINTER ?

? ? ? ? ?

Excuse me … but you’re out of your friggin’ mind.

Get to know someone with a real "four color printing press" …
(1) It will be a *lot* cheaper …

(2) It will be a *lot* faster …

(3) It will be a *lot* less hassle …

(4) You will actually survive the ordeal …

LOL
Just the thought of having 10,000 business cards to cut by hand…
Stephan

Who is cutting them by hand? I’m the OP on a different PC.
I actually have a Guillotine and a 2 colour press. My print shop runs quite nicely thank you very much, has done for the past 25 years. I just didn’t have Full bleed, A3 photographic reproduction capabilities until now. I’ve been printing postcards and calendars on A4 digital (laser) printers for the last year so don’t try to feed me that bullshit about 4 colour being cost effective. I’d have gone into receivership months ago if I’d have listened to the likes of you.

You don’t even have an edge on finish quality any more. The only thread you still have to cling to is the hope of getting long print runs. Eventually… All you inkies will die off the way engravers did. That gives me comfort knowing I won’t have to listen to a load of crap much longer.

My situation now is trying to decide if I’ve been lied to about this Minolta’s capabilities and whether or not to send it back and get the Xerox digital Print Press I also had under consideration. Your bullshit is unwanted, outright wrong and totally biased. Oh, I forgot to mention… Nothing at all to do with the original question.
Thanks Waldo for your reply, I’ll look into it today.

Surprising a "know it all and better" like you has to ask questions on

Surprising a "know it all and better" like you has to ask questions on

this NG

Stephan

Stephan wrote:

Surprising a "know it all and better" like you has to ask questions on

this NG

Stephan

Yeah, not so surprising that a dickhead like you just stuck his nose in to take a sniff… Too much sniffing maybe?

Waldo’s reply answered the questions about time to print. 999 prints later and it’s cruising… Duplexing and making the setup of an offset press and the clean up after, look like something from the ark. Get a life Stephan…

Doug

… wrote:

Doug,

Please hang around the group for a while and get to know who the players are before you start responding too sharply to individual comments. You would do this for any other group of people, wouldn’t you? A news group is no different.

IMHO, Stephan has earned his place here by making many positive contributions.

Yes, Mike.
Like "out of your friggin mind" is a really positive contribution? Or maybe jumping to the conclusion I’m likely to be printing business cards and cutting them by hand?

IMHO, Stephan has earned his place here by making many positive contributions.

Yes Mike, he certainly has earned his place here… Right up there with the doormouse, Hecate (the pretend one) and all the other "positive contributors" who get their rocks off posting insulting remarks anyone asks a question. Like we all have to be so far up our own arseholes that we never have to bother asking questions or reading manuals… Right? Don’t defend the bastard Mike, lest you get considered no better.

Mike Russell wrote:

… wrote:

Doug,

Please hang around the group for a while and get to know who the players are before you start responding too sharply to individual comments. You would do this for any other group of people, wouldn’t you? A news group is no different.

IMHO, Stephan has earned his place here by making many positive contributions.

Yes, Mike.
Like "out of your friggin mind" is a really positive contribution? Or maybe jumping to the conclusion I’m likely to be printing business cards and cutting them by hand?

Another really positive contribution by a really positive bigot with not
the slightest interest in offering an ounce of information about a subject someone making such "positive contributions" ought to at least have a clue on…

Yes Mike, he certainly has earned his place here… Right up there with
the doormouse, Hecate (the pretend one) and all the other "positive contributors" who get their rocks off posting insulting remarks anyone asks a question. Like we all have to be so far up our own arseholes that
we never have to bother asking questions or reading manuals… Right? Don’t defend the bastard Mike, lest you get considered no better.
Doug

PostScript in general is slower than for example PCL.

What kind of network speed do you have? If you’re trying to put 248 MB over 10 Mbps, I can imagine that it takes ages…

If it is the printer processing time, it has a deadslow RIP.
21 pages per minute? Are you sure that is not the black/white speed? Is it a single-pass machine or a multi-pass???

As you discovered, PostScript can be huge. If you have a PostScript 3 RIP, you may be able to send the data as PDF. Using compression in PDF will reduce the print stream. If not, you can reduce the stream a bit by using binary postscript instead of ascii (you can set that in the driver).
In case nothing works: try to figure out if it accepts PCL en use a PCL driver.

Waldo

Mike Russell wrote:

The real problem you have Mike is the Elitist attitude you have. No one earns a place in usnet.

A vulture, waiting to get in the action someone else gets going. Not a very nice practice, is it? Hecate might be an accomplished Photographer and an experienced Photoshop user but try and get a sensible comment from her and 80% of the time it’s as bad as the doormouse’s.

On Sat, 30 Oct 2004 04:56:17 +1000, call me any name
wrote:

A vulture, waiting to get in the action someone else gets going. Not a very nice practice, is it? Hecate might be an accomplished Photographer and an experienced Photoshop user but try and get a sensible comment

from her and 80% of the time it’s as bad as the doormouse’s.

And you’ve been around here so long you have managed to tabulate all my answers and get a percentage of usefulness according to your principles. Don’t you have better things to do?

—

Hecate – The Real One

veni, vidi, reliqui

You still haven’t said why you are the real one. How do I know if the compilation of statistics is wrong because the pretend one posted all the good advise and the real one all the insults? Maybe it’s the other way around. Maybe the pretend one is the monochrome photographer and the real one uses a digicam?

Not simple eh?

The printer will not accept binary data, even though it is supposed to be a PS 3 printer. I did however manage to improve the time to print print speed by connecting the PC via USB instead of Ethernet. I also spooled the whole job on the printer’s hard drive and although the time to print first page is unchanged, the remainder of work proceeded quickly enough. No one at Minolta has yet suggested I can drive it with PCL and I can find nothing about it in the manuals.

The 21 pages per minute in ‘full colour’ is a qualified claim from Minolta. It refers to A4 in the first place so A3 and SRA3 are quite a lot slower. Full colour is qualified as being 8% of the page.

The good news is the quality of colour photographs on Xerox ultra gloss paper are every bit as good as from the mini lab’s printer. Quite remarkable really when you consider the life of inkjet output is dependent on many variables. The life of output from this printer is only dependent on exposure to sunlight as are photographs.

Is it an inkjet printer??? Now I am getting curious about the model!
Waldo