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We keep a careful eye on our own product testing at PC Magazine, looking for ways to improve it whenever we can. So when one printer manufacturer suggested that we might want to test photo-printing speed differently than we currently do, we took a careful look at how the suggested change might affect our reported speeds.
The answer turned out to be that there wasn't enough difference to affect any conclusions in reviews. On the other hand, we thought the results were worth passing along. If you've ever wondered how your speeds might vary from our tests if you take a different approach to printing than we do, you should find these results interesting.
First, a word on how we test. I print one photo at a time, and report the average time for all 4-by-6s and the average time for all 8-by-10s. The manufacturer who tweaked my curiosity says that its research shows most people today print batches of photos, rather than one at a time. It also maintains that we'd get significantly different results if I printed all the photos in a batch with a single print command.
My own experience, confirmed by discussions with several other printer manufacturers, is that people print both ways—individual photos or batches depending on the circumstances—so I discount that part of the claim. Even so, I was interested in finding out whether I'd get significantly different results by printing in batches rather than individual photos.
As it happens, testing the claim raised a minor problem. Because all of our test results need to be fully comparable if at all possible, we use the same software with all printers in all tests. For photos, we use Photoshop, which is the closest thing to a de facto standard for photos. Currently, we use version 7.0, which was the latest version when we did the last major refresh to our test procedures. The problem is that Photoshop doesn't offer an option for printing a batch of photos with a single command.
There is really no other software with the same de facto standard status for photos as Photoshop, but for purposes of this project, I settled on the Windows Photo Printing Wizard, which has the virtue of being built into Windows, making it widespread, if not my photo printing program of choice.
The first question was whether, given the same driver settings, the Photo Printer Wizard would print individual photos at the same speed as Photoshop. Table 1 shows the results for printing 4-by-6 photos from both programs for ten printers: the Canon Pixma mini320, the Canon Pixma MX850, the Canon Pixma MP970, the Canon Selphy ES2, the Epson PictureMate Dash, the HP Officejet H470, HP Photosmart C7280, HP Photosmart C8180, HP Photosmart D7460 Printer, and the Lexmark X9575 Professional. The printers were chosen to include a mix of dedicated photo printers, desktop ink jet printers, and ink jet AIOs from an assortment of manufacturers. They are all designed, at least partly, with a focus on photos.
As Table 1 shows, there is no significant difference—at least in a practical sense, if not necessarily a statistical sense—between the two programs. (Note that for some printers there are differences between the speeds reported here and the speeds I reported in my reviews. The differences are due to changes in other variables, like paper type and the associated driver setting. With those printers for which I had to use a different paper type or change another variable, I reran the Photoshop tests as well.)—Next: Speed Testing >