Adding more memory to your printer may help it print faster and handle more complex documents.

Complex Printing Jobs ?

Printers almost always ship with enough memory to handle jobs that involve basic text. But if you're printing graphics, it can be a different story.

For photographs and pictures -- especially web pages with a lot of graphics -- you will need more memory to print, even in black and white.

For high-resolution black and white graphics, you may also need more memory.

Multiple script languages

If your office uses both PCL and PostScript languages, which allow for stretched text graphics, you may need a memory upgrade.

If you often get "memory overload," "overflow errors," and "out of memory" messages, your documents are too complex and you need more memory.

Personal Printing

Test of Hewlett Packard LaserJet 1100 series printers with added RAM memory show these dramatic performance improvements with spreadsheets, slide sets, desktop publishing, and web printing:

• Adding 4MB of DRAM for a total of 6 MB reduces output times by 30 to 80 percent
• Adding 10MB of DRAM for a total of 12MB virtually ensures no "memory out" errors

Hewlett Packard LaserJet 2100 series printers require 20 MB total to print multi page 1200 dpi documents with comparable performance 600 dpi documents.  Examples using 20 MB:

• Output time reduced by 66% with a 10-page slide set
• Output time reduced by 33% with a 5-page report
• Output time reduced by 66% with a 10-page HTML file

Shared Monochrome Printing

Tests using Hewlett Packard LaserJet 4000, 5000, and 8000 series printers show a range of performance improvements when base RAM is supplemented.  Users should consider adding RAM if they frequently print the following:

• Multiple-copy slide sets - print time reduced more than 50% by upgrading to 36 MB
• Web-based HTML files- print times reduced by 30% by upgrading to 20 MB
• PDF files - print times reduced by 50% and errors avoided by upgrading to 24 MB
• Multi page general office documents - print times reduced by more than 50% by upgrading to 20 MB

Color Printing

RAM is especially critical to reducing print times of color files.  Tests of Hewlett Packard Color LaserJet 4500 and 8500 series printers showed that increased RAM would improve performance in these categories:

• General Office - print-time reduction is 30% and errors is eliminated with 48 MB
• Color Presentations - Print-time reduction is 40% with a total of 64 MB; with two-sided documents, an additional 16% performance improvement is achieved with 96 MB
• Graphics-Rich Files - when testing vector drawings and TIFF images, print times for large 8 by 10 inch images decrease by 24% with a total of 56 MB
• Desktop Publishing - print-time reduction is 30% is achieved with a total of 96 MB

>> Checking a Printer's Memory <<