Printing via microsoft picture viewer

[JSC]

Hi all.

I went to a customer today who prints a large number a pics to their Biz C253 via Microsoft picture viewer ( 4x pc's all win 7 and I don't think the machine model is importent). They are rentel agents and what they do is take a bunch of pic's of each property and get the tenants to sign them agreeing to the state of the property, now thay take about 150 to 300 pic's of each house, so this is about 200mb to 400mb file size. When they print they select 4up and single sided, when this spools it bumps the 200mb file size up to 2.8Gb and obviously takes forever to print (I gave up after an 1hr 30min). Yet when I plug my lapie which runs XP pro onto their network and do the same thing all be it through the xp version of my windows viewer it does not bump up the file size and only takes 10min to print!!!
I have updated the drivers on their system, they are all set up as local and I have tried PCL and PS. I can not see anything in picture viewer that I can change in how it prints, Im at a loss.

Are there any clever people out there who can help?

[Jules Winfield]

Try using the print driver for all layout and finishing functions. In other words, don't select "collate" or anything similar through the Microsoft Picture Viewer print dialogue. Uncheck any similar settings in the dialogue that are selected by default. Let the driver do all the heavy lifting...

[TheOwl]

Try using the XPS driver as PCL and PS are now legacy print languages within Windows Vista and up. With XML starting to be the new standard with a lot of things, the XPS driver now writes everything in XML.

I have seen this exact problem, but happening on an XP machine. The customer then started to use the Adobe CS Suite after that.

[Stirton.M]

It could not hurt to edit the images to the 600DPI constraint either.

I am with TheOwl regarding using Adobe CS as well...even Acrobat Pro will be an improvement over the microsoft solution...save the file as a PDF, then print as image in the advanced dialog of the print process...forces the rasterizing on the PC and greatly improves print speed.

[JSC]

Try using the print driver for all layout and finishing functions. In other words, don't select "collate" or anything similar through the Microsoft Picture Viewer print dialogue. Uncheck any similar settings in the dialogue that are selected by default. Let the driver do all the heavy lifting...

Tried that it had no effect.

Try using the XPS driver as PCL and PS are now legacy print languages within Windows Vista and up. With XML starting to be the new standard with a lot of things, the XPS driver now writes everything in XML.

I have seen this exact problem, but happening on an XP machine. The customer then started to use the Adobe CS Suite after that.

I didn't think of the XPS driver I will give that a go.

It could not hurt to edit the images to the 600DPI constraint either.

I am with TheOwl regarding using Adobe CS as well...even Acrobat Pro will be an improvement over the microsoft solution...save the file as a PDF, then print as image in the advanced dialog of the print process...forces the rasterizing on the PC and greatly improves print speed.

I have gone down the Adobe route, but the customer insists on using only the microsoft app "It always used to work" is the usual line from the customer.

[rthonpm]

What about trying Irfanview? It's free, unlike Adobe solutions, and also allows for some basic photo editing. Microsoft's Picture Viewer has always been a POS. Printing for the most part is an afterthought with the programme.

[Stirton.M]

What about trying Irfanview? It's free, unlike Adobe solutions, and also allows for some basic photo editing. Microsoft's Picture Viewer has always been a POS. Printing for the most part is an afterthought with the programme.

I agree about it being a viewer, not a printing program. It is no different that power point...nothing more annoying than having people print from that POS too...and run into the same issue.



JSC, sure it used to work....something had to have changed....my bet is, new camera with higher resolution.

Thing is, there is only so much you can do. I would suggest you find out what is with the images, because that is most likely the only reason there is any problem. Slow printing is, more often than not, likely due to file size. A way to know for sure is to simply print the document and observe the print queue on the client machine, to see how large the file becomes as it is sent.

I would personally use my own hardware and Acrobat Pro, use the same images (edited for DPI of course), and print to the machine, just to see. Actually, I can, because of Acrobat Pro, print to PDF from any application, so I could easily use picture viewer and export that to a pdf output.

Quite frankly, if it is just their inability and insistence to using inferior software, your job is done. I know I would not put much effort beyond verifying the file size verification being sent to the printer via the driver queue. Either they get the point, or they do not.

Of course, it might be the printer, though I have my doubts...or for that matter, some issue with the network....failing router, poor connection, even the link speed at the computer, or even the copier for that matter....eliminate that by doing local tests via your laptop.

[TheOwl]

Just had another thought regarding this one.

When using the PS driver, was there a difference at all? There is also a feature within the PS driver called 'Allow Postscript Passthrough'. This can be disabled and have further effects with the spooled document.

PS Passthrough is the feature that allows the computer to interact with the print job as far as helping to RIP to job. Turning this off then stops the PC from 'playing' with the print data and making the printer / copier do all the work. I have seen a couple of cases where changing this option has also cut down on the print size.

Maybe worth a shot.

[JSC]

Thanks for everybodys thoughts on this, basically I proved to myself that the fault was not with the machine but the crap picture viewer software, so I went back and explained this to the customer and went through their options ie getting better software like Adobe etc etc, they suprise suprise didn't agree and were having none of it!! So in the end I downloaded and installed Picasa (yes I know there are better free programs out there) on one of their workstations, sent one of their print jobs to the bizhub and low and behold 10 min later the print job had finished ) job done!!. I gave them advice on the better programs available, but said that was up to them.
I was tempted to uninstall Picasa and let them get on with it, but I didn't, im just waiting for the call to say they don't know how to use it..

Thank you to everyone for their input it was appreciated.