Need Help with Printing or Understanding

[mooredb]

Ok - can someone explain to me why when I try to print a photo that is 1.2 mb for example it shows up in my printer que at 27 mb and it takes for ever to print. And sometimes it won't print at all and just times out. This only happens when I send the images to my Ricoh SP 8111DN color printer (also I just downloaded the lastest drives and installed them). When I send it to a black and white printer it prints fast. The programs that I have tried printing this from are Picasa and Windows Photo Gallery.

Does this have something to do with RAW format? Any ideas or other software out there that I can use?

Thanks.

[moffetb]

It has little to do with RAW format. The file size of the print job depends mostly on the command structure your printer takes. That depends on the driver, and how the translation is done between the image and the printer.

1.2 MB is actually a misnomer. That is probably a compressed file that is 1.2 MB. The uncompressed may be much higher than that. As an example, if you look at a JPEG image that is 1024 x 1024, the actual image on disk may be 120K or so. However, in uncompressed format it is going to be 3 meg in size at least, if not 4 meg. (each pixel has 3 colors, each color has 1 byte, so you get 1M pixels times 3, some "24-bit" formats are actually stored in 32 bits per pixel).

You might be able to get around this problem by processing your image to the same DPI your printer wants, which is probably 240 or 300. This is not the same as the number of dots per inch your printer can actually print.

Good luck, it's a complex subject and depends on your software and printer.

Brian