IPM vs PPM - canon printer

<p>Hi there. I'm looking for a new printer now as I gave my previous one to my mum to replace her old dinosaur. I own a 5D Mark 2 and wanted to find a decent Canon photo printer that will make nice prints. HOWEVER: I mainly print documents, and want to find a photo printer that prints DOCUMENTS fast. But how do I determine the speed? The Canon PIXMA MP640 has numerous positive reviews on Amazon UK for printing photos. Great. But I I want to figure out how fast it is printing text on mono draft setting. My previous printer (HP Photosmart C7280) had a PPM (pages per minute) of 33 in mono draft mode for documents. This was awesome. I'm checking out the Canon Pixma MP640, and its print speed is listed as 9.2 IPM (inches per minute). What does this refer to? Photos, or text? How does this compare to PPM? Why don't manufacturers use PPM across the board, it seems much easier to understand. I think in terms of how many pages my printer has printed, not how many inches it's printed... Help gratiously sought... thanks</p>

<p>PPM is out, IPM is in.</p>

<p>These websites might give you the info you're looking for.</p>

<p>http://www.cartridgenews.com/isoiec-24734-standard-brings-uniformity-to-print-speed-measurements/?p=0223</p>

<p>http://www.canon-asia.com/bewareofdoublestandards/</p>

<p>The IPM standard that you refer to is Images Per Minute, rather than inches per minute. It's a way of measuring the printing speed using a standard 4 page document containing images and text.</p>

<p>Peter</p>

<p>OK. I'm terrible at maths though. Can you tell me what 9ipm and 12 ipm is in pages a minute? There is some formula on there but I really am shit with maths.</p>

<p>From that link you posted, I quote<br>

"For selected printers, both <a href="http://www.hp.com/products1/ISO/MMDPP/index.html" target="_blank">HP</a> and <a href="http://www.usa.canon.com/app/pdf/PrintSpeed/ISO_standard.pdf" target="_blank">Canon</a> calculate ipm by counting <strong>number of pages printed during a Medium Job minus four, and then dividing that by the time measured under the ESAT method</strong> for Excel, Word and Adobe each. The three speeds can then be reported individually, or averaged out and reported as an overall print speed. Here’s an example of calculating ipm under the ESAT method for a Medium Job:<br>

Let’s say that during the testing time frame for each test file (i.e. 4 pages printed plus another 30 seconds of printing), the tested printer rolls out the following page amounts: Adobe test file prints 10 pages, Word prints 12 pages, and Excel prints 14 pages. To calculate the ipm for the Adobe file, you would take the 10 pages, subtract 4, and divide by 0.5 minutes (i.e. 30 seconds) to get <strong>12 ipm</strong>. For Word, you take the 12 pages, subtract 4, and divide by 0.5 minutes to get <strong>16 ipm</strong>. Finally, for Excel, you take the 14 pages, subtract 4, and divide by 0.5 minutes to get <strong>20 ipm</strong>. To get the overall ipm, you would take the average of 12, 16 and 20 to get <strong>16 ipm</strong>."</p>

<p>Now, I don't know about you, but using something so goddamn hard to figure out is not exactly the most palatable thing for a consumer. Rather than getting out my old GCSE maths book from school, I'd rather just go into a shop, understand that the printer will take roughly x minutes to print x pages. If you can do the math here for me then I can just continue to be a happy consumer. please? Xxx</p>

 

<p>I agree with you on that. I know that photographic images are different, and the print times for photo images will vary depending on content, but it seems like it would be a simple matter to state the time it takes to print one page of text. </p>

<p>Since you want a Canon printer, I presume you will be comparing one Canon printer to another Canon printer. So the test times should give you a good comparison of which one is fastest without doing any math since they will all be tested with the same test files using the same IPM standard. It's not as if you have to compare printers where one uses the old PPM standard and another uses the new IPM standard.</p>

<p>Finally, if you want to compare PPM to IPM, I'd guess that the "page" in PPM is approx. the same as the "image" in IPM. I say that because from looking at the test files used to determine print speed, they are mostly text anyway, with some graphics that you might see in an office document. They are not using a photo, which would take longer to print. So the very fast HP printer you had printed 33 PPM or approx. 1 page in two seconds, compared to the Canon printer that prints 9 "images" per minute, or 1 page in 6.7 seconds. If the Canon printed all text in the test rather than "Images" the print time should be faster. Likewise, if the HP printer had some graphics in the test docs, the time should be slightly longer. It should be noted that the new standard states that the tests are done on plain paper in default mode. </p>

<p>Peter</p>

<p> </p>