Slowing down the Canon printer

I tried a 50 foot cable from my TV set and tried printing some photos of my grandma, good thing she was not standing here, the prints coming out of the printer were all nudes from CD Girls.
 
Has anyone tried Rick's app under XP with success?
I am using Windows XP Home Edition. Warning....I have had some
sytem freeze up problems that Rick warned about, but that is to be
expected with the purpose of the program.
--
Desert Rat
Have you been able to ctrl,alt,del and use task manager to escape
from it, or do you have to kill power to reboot? I have other
programs that are giving some results but I think Rick's program
would give more control on how much I slow the system down if ti
will work ok with xp.
I don't see any reason it would not work fine with XP, and no
ctrl,alt,del will not work if you have it set to realtime and don't
give the operating system enough time to process the ctrl-alt-del.
Setting a programs priority to realtime makes it more important
than the operating system, so if my program is not giving the
operating system enough time to process its normal interrupts, then
the system freezes and there is no way out. You should only get
the lockup condition when you press the Go button with settings
that slow the pc down too much, if the system still works after
that, it should remain working with those settings.
If you actually intend to use this for real, please let me know and
I will create a version which takes the times in on the command
line so you can make a shortcut which will start it with your
settings.
Rick K
I wouldn't bother to do that for me (unless someone else wants it). I may want to use diffrent settings to slow the printer down diffrent amounts for diffrent circumstances. That why I like the idea of using your program rather than what I am using. I'll play with it when I have more time and find some good settings for my system. Do you have a good starting point for settings though. Perhaps something a little faster. Then I can try slowing it down a step at a time? I am running xp home on a 900mhz intel celeron with with 256mb of mem if it maters. By the way, which direction do I alter settings to slow it down more?
Thanks again for going to the trouble.
 
Since it seems difrent computers will print at diffrent speeds with canons, I thought I would post my average print times just in case anybody wanted to compare. This is on my i850
Printing 8.5x11 at best quality
Bordered prints from photo shop took about 2 min 30 sec
Borderless from easy photo print took about 1 min 40 sec

I don't know if it was the diffrence because of the software or the border. I took these times for another test a little while back. This is without anything slowing the system down of course. So thats the ballpark time mine prints in.
 
Richard Homeyer wrote:
I wouldn't bother to do that for me (unless someone else wants it).
I may want to use diffrent settings to slow the printer down
diffrent amounts for diffrent circumstances. That why I like the
idea of using your program rather than what I am using. I'll play
with it when I have more time and find some good settings for my
system. Do you have a good starting point for settings though.
Perhaps something a little faster. Then I can try slowing it down
a step at a time? I am running xp home on a 900mhz intel celeron
with with 256mb of mem if it maters. By the way, which direction
do I alter settings to slow it down more?
Thanks again for going to the trouble.
Let me refer to numbers as xx-yy where xx = "time to kill" and yy="time to wait"

start with 50-50. Setting priority to realtime will make the program behave the most predictably. using up 50ms in a realtime process seems to be ok, you could also start with 25-25 as long as the numbers are the same, then you should be using half of your proccessing power in my program.

Basically you have a ratio of used up time - to available time, by changing that ratio you can effect how much processing power is available. The only other issue is to make sure the "time to kill" is not too large of a number - the smaller that number is the happier the rest of your system will be. But I started at 50 because with 25 I did not have enough control over the ratio. So what I am saying is you will have to experiment :)

Making "time to kill" smaller will do less - it will leave your pc running faster. so 1-50 will make your pc busy for 1ms and idle 50ms.

Making "time to wait" smaller will do more - it will leave your pc running slower. So 50-1 will probably lock your pc.

The way to keep your pc from locking up is to change the "time to wait by 1 each time and try moving an explorer window around on your screen - as the number gets smaller you will see the operating system having trouble keeping up and updating the screen. As this gets worse you will suddenly have trouble doing anything - when this happens you went a little too far and should back off.
Good luck,
Rick K
 
Slowing down the print time is not the objective., this does nothing. The data is sent a certain way and due to the way it is banded, the slower CPU will not cause a problem (not to mention the data is normally is spooled)

If you do a search, you can find Linux Open Source for print drivers and that includes some canons. When you look at the data sent to the printer, you can see how the driver works to accomplish this.
 
Yeah, Joe, I somehow click on your nt post to see if there's any
text anyway... :)
Thanks. I was hoping someone would.

Ciao!

Joe
Joseph, do you posess any magic powers???? I do not normally click,unless it is accidental, but in your case I clicked too, although I DID clearly see that is said "nt" and had also NOT read fotografer's post.

Hmmmm.... Something is wrong here! We are all posessed by the magic guata-tarama-nutsi-nutsi power.....

(I hope the guata-blah-blah-blah stuff doesn't have any real meaning in any language).

--
Pabletto
http://www.pbase.com/pabletto
(samples taken with the MINOLTA DiMAGE 7)
Last update 22 October 2002 (Flower shots)
 
Other than
that, there is no way to accomplish what you're talking about
unless you can reverse-engineer the data stream
Just look at the Linux drivers src.
Hey, good idea - maybe someone else has already done this work... If the datastream for the S and i series is already known, then it wouldn't be too hard to develope a Windows Port Monitor that could sniff the data stream to figure out when to 'pause' before letting the next printsweep go down the wire. It would even be possible to add the pause time as a custom option in the Canon printer driver so that it would appear to be a 'factory' option like "Pause between sweep delay time:"

-phils
 
Joseph, do you posess any magic powers????
Yes, although I haven't practiced my brujo skills in quite a while.
I do not normally
click,unless it is accidental, but in your case I clicked too,
although I DID clearly see that is said "nt" and had also NOT read
fotografer's post.
Hmmmm.... Something is wrong here! We are all posessed by the magic
guata-tarama-nutsi-nutsi power.....
(I hope the guata-blah-blah-blah stuff doesn't have any real
meaning in any language).
It's either a recipe or a curse.

guata - to grow fat

guata - belly, especially the edible form, tripe

tarama - fish roe, or a mix of roe, breadcrumbs, and cheese

nutsi - nutritious

nutsi - crazy

So, either a curse: get fat and go crazy on fish eggs

Or a recipe: fish eggs, cheese, and tripe, which is supposed to be very nutritious.

In any case, I'm a strict vegetarian.

Ciao!

Joe
 
Since it seems difrent computers will print at diffrent speeds with
canons, I thought I would post my average print times just in case
anybody wanted to compare. This is on my i850
Printing 8.5x11 at best quality
Bordered prints from photo shop took about 2 min 30 sec
Borderless from easy photo print took about 1 min 40 sec
I can't see why you say that. I did time my prints too though (spooling excluded) so, from the moment my Canon sucked in my A4 page it took about 2 minutes and 15 seconds (NOT from the moment I clicked on print). It was a bordered A4 page.

I can understand the time of spooling to be different between computers, but I do not think that print speed will change, considering you do not keep your system busy.

--
Pabletto
http://www.pbase.com/pabletto
(samples taken with the MINOLTA DiMAGE 7)
Last update 22 October 2002 (Flower shots)
 
Gee, something IS wrong here. Just moments after I clicked the nt post from Joe I THOUGHT my room started to turn, and then for no reason the clock seemed to 'jumped', and like a twinkling of an eye, 30 minutes past!

I gotta check if anything in my house is missing. Though I would be GLAD if my wife is missing for a while. ;)

I am generally a vegetarian, but I eat fish on some days, and vegan meals for 40 days in a row four times a year (to detox).

Perhaps Joe can recommend a mantra to slow down the Canon print speed without software 'rigging'? A mantra RIP, anyone? ;)

--
Fotografer
...like, a total himbo
 
Hey, good idea - maybe someone else has already done this work...
If the datastream for the S and i series is already known, then it
wouldn't be too hard to develope a Windows Port Monitor that could
sniff the data stream to figure out when to 'pause' before letting
the next printsweep go down the wire. It would even be possible to
add the pause time as a custom option in the Canon printer driver
so that it would appear to be a 'factory' option like "Pause
between sweep delay time:"
That was my first thought as well. It might be easier than that though. When printing starts, you get the little printer icon on your Windows task bar indicating that the print queue for your printer is operating. This is a standard Windows queue and the queue can be paused/resumed at will (I believe programmatically). What if a utility could be written that simply toggled the pause/resume state of the job in the queue so that the data is sent to the printer much slower... or in chunks. In the utility, you could just specify on/off (resume/pause) time. I'm not sure if the timings would be consistent or could be accurately controlled given that other Windows operations would be going on too, but it might be worth a try.

If I had the time, I could probably write something like that myself but time is something I have less and less of these days. Maybe someone who does a little programming could look into it to see if it would be possible; maybe using something like the SetJob Windows API command?

Anyway... just a thought.

P.S. The above is just an idea to slow down printing overall. Since I'm a little late entering this thread, have you convinced yourselves that adding a sweep-to-sweep delay is going to do what you want, or is it possible that you would need to slow down the physical (single) sweep time of the head which is not something that any software could control?

--
Mike
http://www.ddisoftware.com
 
If I had the time, I could probably write something like that
myself but time is something I have less and less of these days.
Maybe someone who does a little programming could look into it to
see if it would be possible; maybe using something like the SetJob
Windows API command?
I thought insted to just implement a GPD or print render engine for the S series. However, like yourseld time is the issue: new house, 3000customers looking for a new software version ect....
Anyway... just a thought.

P.S. The above is just an idea to slow down printing overall.
Since I'm a little late entering this thread, have you convinced
yourselves that adding a sweep-to-sweep delay is going to do what
you want, or is it possible that you would need to slow down the
physical (single) sweep time of the head which is not something
that any software could control?
A band/sweep delay would be useless. We have to make multiple squirts of less ink before moving to the next position to give the ink time to be asorbed. If not possible because of encoder strip accuracy when not moving steadily, the a slower sweep will have to do.

Mike, if you find the time, the source to look at is print-canon.c in the gimp-print opensrc package. The S800 is in there I believe

canon_write_line, and canon_print are the meat and 'tater to review.

Have fun.

-CAL

The way I saw to corref
 
The way to keep your pc from locking up is to change the "time to
wait by 1 each time and try moving an explorer window around on
your screen - as the number gets smaller you will see the operating
system having trouble keeping up and updating the screen. As this
gets worse you will suddenly have trouble doing anything - when
this happens you went a little too far and should back off.
Good luck,
I will agree with Rick on finding settings that work for you. I started at 50/50 realtime, then 50/20, then 50/15, but at 50/12 my system worked the first time and locked up the next time. With the naked eye I could not see adiffrence between 50/15 and 50/12. The time difference was only about a minute.

I work at a small charter school and am printing pictures of the graduates. I want the prints to last, so I opted for the Ilford Galerie Classic Pearl.

Thanks for the program and advice Rick!
--
Desert Rat
 
Desert Rat wrote:
I will agree with Rick on finding settings that work for you. I
started at 50/50 realtime, then 50/20, then 50/15, but at 50/12 my
system worked the first time and locked up the next time. With the
naked eye I could not see adiffrence between 50/15 and 50/12. The
time difference was only about a minute.
Unfortunatly slowing down the PC is about the worst way to do what you guys are doing, so I am glad at least works well enough to do what you need.

Elsewhere in this thread there was a good idea about controlling the print spooler - I will try to take a look at doing that - I'm not going to devote a great deal of time to this but Mike had suggested a Windows API that might help. If I come up with anything I'll let you know.

Rick K
 
Over the last couple of days it simply amazes me the troube people will go to to try and print on one specific type of paper. Is the paper that good you need to use it exclusively?

If the quiet mode doesn't slow the printer down enough for the paper type, then you need to quit wasting time on this idea and choose a different paper.

Messing with trying to overwork your processor so the printer doesn't print so fast sort of defeats the purpose of having a faster printer. Not to mention the possibility of screwing up all the other processes that are running in the background.

IMHO this whole thing has been an exercise in silliness. Why not just use a different paper?

--
http://www.pbase.com/wp12001
'Say what again?'
 
WP,

The idea here is to get longer-lasting prints with Resin-coated papers on the Canon printers. Canon OEM inks, though dye-based, and strangely just not as Resin-coated paper friendly as nanoporous (and relatively unstable, albeit better picture quality) ones... One plausible explanation is because of Canon's blazing print speeds... Now if only Canon allow, like Epson, the ability to slow down the printing to accomodate more paper types...

You see, at the end of the day, contrary to popular (digital) beliefs, people want their printed pictures to last as long as possible...
Over the last couple of days it simply amazes me the troube people
will go to to try and print on one specific type of paper. Is the
paper that good you need to use it exclusively?

If the quiet mode doesn't slow the printer down enough for the
paper type, then you need to quit wasting time on this idea and
choose a different paper.

Messing with trying to overwork your processor so the printer
doesn't print so fast sort of defeats the purpose of having a
faster printer. Not to mention the possibility of screwing up all
the other processes that are running in the background.

IMHO this whole thing has been an exercise in silliness. Why not
just use a different paper?

--
http://www.pbase.com/wp12001
'Say what again?'
--
Fotografer
...like, a total himbo
 

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