USING MULTIPLE PRINTERS FOR PRINT JOBS

[ramotanarg]

Let us say I have 5 printers connected  to my laptop. I want to set them up so that when I hit the print button the pages of the document are distributed evenly among the printers. Example when I print a 20  page document I want each of the 5 printers to print 4 pages of the document. The idea is to have all my printers share the print load regardless of the amount of pages the document has.

I attached a picture which shows what I am trying to explain.

Thanks in advance for your help




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[Salmon Trout]

There are many distributed-printing solutions. If you Google for that phrase you will find plenty of ideas. For example Multi Print 2.0

[ramotanarg]

Reply to Salmon Trout

Multi print does not have the feature. please take a good look at the photo. so you can better understand what I am asking.

Multi print just sends the same document to all printers so I end up with five separate copies of the 20 page document.

If the printing is done they way that is shown in the photo then I will end up with one 20 page document being printed at a much faster rate than usual (about 1/5 the usual time it would take one printer if all the printer print at the same speed).

[Lisa_maree]

Hi

Interesting question but logic says why?
Most printers if they are inkjet take as long to purge the head and pick up the first page as the time  to print 5 pages. Also the head purging can waste as much ink as printing 3 pages.
Five  printers on standby would use as much power as a single printer printing. 

And if it is a laser printer most print 22 pages per minute after warm up of 20 seconds so it will take longer in that situation to print the 20 pages on 5 printers than on 1 printer.

 

[ramotanarg]

I intend to use inkjet printers and the amount of ink or the price of the Ink that will be used is not an issue. The printers wont be bought either, I am a computer technician so I have lots of them laying around. Power consumption is also not an issue. Also consider that colour documents print slower than black and white documents. The main concern is speeding up printing of large documents.

For example lets say the amount of time it takes after you click on the print button to the end of purging the head is 2 minutes and it takes another 10 minutes to print the 20 page colour document on one printer. That means it would take a total of 12 minutes to print the document.

If you had five printers working simultaneously the 20 page colour document would take 4 minutes to print. I think that is a much better printing speed then using one printer.