Best way to print on canvas

[tango554]

Hey everyone,

I'm printing 44x44 images into canvas- each file being approximately 22mb. I am using a firewire epson stylus 9800 printer.

I have been printing using photoshop with two computers, a 15" Powerbook g4 1.67ghz 2gbram, OS10.2.?, and a 12" iBook G4 800ghz, 640mb ram, OS 10.3.9. The total time from clicking print to completion on the powerbook is approximately 47 minutes. The ibook, 55 minutes.

I have purchased a 15" macbook pro 2.16ghz 2gb ram. I have not printed off of this comptuer yet, but I'm assuming it will be a bit faster than both. My question is if there is a better program to print from than photoshop? For instance, a universal binary program? Speeding up print time improves the quality of my prints and efficiency of my business. I suppose the question boils down to: What is the fastest way to print on canvas using a macbook pro?

 

[Crawn2003]

Hmm....

One point I noticed was the OS version you're using. 10.2.? Only thing I can say is that would help with printing (from what I've seen) is upgrading the OS. It'll be a little faster just because each version of OS X has improved speed on all areas.

I would say that the MacBook Pro would be faster, but make sure that you have the current version of Photoshop because CS2 or earlier on a MacBook Pro will run in Rosetta mode and will be possibly be slower than on the other machines that have G4 processors in them instead of Intel.

As for printing and my humble opinion... Photoshop is probably the best way to go. I use it and compared to some of the things I've used it does a lot better. In the newest edition of Photoshop, CS3, they've really expanded on the whole print options. I know that they have support for advance features for Epson, Canon, HP, etc. printers but I don't know which ones in particular.

RIP software maybe? I personally don't like to print with it, and usually when I do it's for B&W printing.
Here is a link about RIP software:
http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/rip/a/rip.htm

I hope I helped a little!

~Crawn

 

[Crawn2003]

Oh, and another thing you may want to consider is hooking up that Epson 9800 to a USB 2.0 port. That will give more data throughput from the computer to the printer because USB 2.0 is a tad faster than FireWire. I used to have my Epson 2400 hooked up to FireWire and had so many problems with it. I called Epson and they told me to hook it up to a USB port and not only has the errors gone away but also I've noticed my print time has decreased a little so I can get more prints out in a shorter amount of time.

Just a thought.

~Crawn

 

[tango554]

Oh, and another thing you may want to consider is hooking up that Epson 9800 to a USB 2.0 port. That will give more data throughput from the computer to the printer because USB 2.0 is a tad faster than FireWire. I used to have my Epson 2400 hooked up to FireWire and had so many problems with it. I called Epson and they told me to hook it up to a USB port and not only has the errors gone away but also I've noticed my print time has decreased a little so I can get more prints out in a shorter amount of time.

Just a thought.

~Crawn

I thought firewire 400's sustained speeds were faster than usb 2.0?

What kind of printers do you print on Crawn? I'm thinking of buying another one, but don't know anything except epson. Professional large format printers....anyone's thoughts?

 

[Crawn2003]

I thought firewire 400's sustained speeds were faster than usb 2.0?

What kind of printers do you print on Crawn? I'm thinking of buying another one, but don't know anything except epson. Professional large format printers....anyone's thoughts?

Actually yeah, you're right. That's what I get for getting 4 hours of sleep last night and getting up at 6 and posting on the forum! But yes, FireWire is faster with it's throughput. I think what I was getting at was that I have way less errors with the USB 2.0 so that I don't have to waste time with sorting those out.

As for printers... My home studio I used a Epson R2400 because most of my prints are not bigger than 13x30 so the R2400 is great. At the school I attended they're using Epson R2400's and Epson 4000's which are really nice. I forget the one that's at the studio I work at but I'll look tomorrow when I go in.

~Crawn