I have a new color laser printer (HP 2025dn) that seems satisfactory. It replaces my cheap Samsung CLP-300 which died when one of the plastic gears that drives the pick-up roller shaft apparently broke a tooth. The Samsung would have to be very seriously disassembled to even get to this gear, and getting the part would probably be more trouble than it is worth (it was a $99 printer), especially here in Mexico.

The 2025dn is nice. It has automatic duplexing, and the image quality is better than the Samsung, at least while the printer is new. I think it is going to be quite expensive to operate, about $400 for a complete toner set (that's more than I paid for the printer!) compared to $24 for the Samsung, although in all fairness that $24 set was aftermarket, not OEM and did not give the best quality, and the $400 HP set includes new drums, developer, etc. so it isn't an apples to apples comparison.

Anyway, my only concern so far is how long it takes for first print. Once the printer starts it goes along at quite a nice pace. The documentation claims 21 pages per minute in either color or black and white, and while I haven't actually timed it, that seems about right. The delay in first print seems to be mostly in how long it takes the printer to "wake up" and get ready to print. If the printer is in "Ready" mode it takes 10 seconds from the time I send the page to the printer until the green light on the printer starts blinking (16 seconds in "power-save"), saying the printer is receiving data. Then it's seven or eight seconds before it pulls the paper from the paper tray and goes to work.

The printer is plugged into my WRT54G router so that it can be shared with SWMBO's Macintosh. Other things connected to the router are my Ooma VOIP phone and my cable modem.

Is this 10 (or 16) second delay before the printer acknowledges that data is being received reasonable, or should I be looking at network settings or something?

tanstaafl.

What sort of document is being printed? It's possible the printer won't necessarily begin to warm up until it gets a whole page to print. Although I realise you are saying it doesn't flash the light for up to 10 seconds.

A print job with pictures can easily run into 100-200MB. Over 100Mb Ethernet that is 10-20 seconds at raw line speed alone.

How long with something like a notepad document (which would be quite small)?

Also remember there will be some delay at Windows' end to prepare the print job and start spooling it.

It could just be that the printer takes that long to wake up - shouldn't really but maybe.

How is the printer port set up in Windows? Is it by IP or by name. It could some sort of DNS resolve issue.

Is the Mac any different to the Windows machine?

I would guess it's warming up. You could try printing a test page off of the printer (like the network settings or something) and see how long that takes. Then you would be eliminating all of the possible network issues.

Do two print jobs in succession without letting it go into power save mode. If you don't get that delay then it is waiting to get the fuser hot and to turn on all the other heavy power consumption components.

You should be able to see how big the print job is from the print queue in Windows as well. If its massive then it might just be the delay in sending the first page or two.

Definitely reasonable. Most laser printers are designed to be "always on" devices, meaning that they are intended to be shared amongst all the office workers and left turned on 100 percent of the time.

They spend most of their time sitting there waiting for someone in the office to send them a print job. To make them energy-efficient, they are using minimal power to listen on their input ports for a print job, and only doing the serious warm-up operations (heating up the fuser assembly for example) when they get their first print job. Then they'll stay warmed-up for some period of time, and if they don't get another print job, they'll go back to sleep again.

You might be able to configure that hysteresis period in the printer's settings somewhere.

Think of it this way, you could handle the printer two ways:

1. You could physically turn off the printer each time you are done using it. Then, you could turn on the printer right before you want to print, wait 10-20 seconds for it to warm up, then immediately send it a print job.

2. You could leave the printer turned on all the time, and send it print jobs whenever you feel like it, and wait 10-20 seconds for the first print job of a group.

Either way you have to wait for the printer warmup for that first page.

Okay, here are some more detailed timings.

Power off --> Ready: 25 seconds
Power Save --> Ready: 0 seconds
Ready --> blinking data received light: 9.6 seconds
Blinking light --> Startup (motors whirring, etc.): 1 second
Startup --> Page Out: 14 seconds.

It is the third stage (the 9.6 seconds from the time I tell the computer to Print until the green data acquisition light starts to blink) that I was curious about. However, since there is only a 1 second delay before the printer goes into action (motors spin up, paper is grabbed and sent on its path, etc.) I suspect that the start of the blinking is not signaling the beginning of data acquisition,but perhaps the conclusion of data for the first page.

But that doesn't seem right either. If it takes that long for the first page, how does it do the remaining pages (in a multi-page print job) at the rate of one page every three seconds?

Other printers I have used always started the blinking data light within two or three seconds of sending the print command.

tanstaafl.

It's probably just processing time, converting the printer language to an array of points for the printer to adhere to the paper.