New York, NY -- In a blog post from the site DataBazaar.com, Sean Doherty discusses how much memory it will take to successfully run your printer with little frustration and slow downs. As he notes, while printers today have three types of memory: SDRAM (for storing print jobs), ROM (for giving the printer instructions for handling tasks), EEPROM (to retain your configuration parameters), they all should come with sufficient ROM and EEPROM.
The number which you have to concern yourself with is the amount of SDRAM (synchronous dynamic random access memory) your printer has. The two major languages that print jobs are transmitted from your PC to your printer in are PostScript or PCL. These are what the printer takes in and then converts to bitmap images for printing on your page.
At a resolution of 300 x 300 dpi, it will take at least 1MB of memory to store a monochrome, letter-sized page. For color pages, you need at least 4MB (1MB for each of the colors). As the number of pages increases then, the amount of memory needed will also increase. In order for a job to get queued to the printer, there needs to be sufficient memory waiting. Otherwise the print job will be delayed until the memory is sufficient.
To be on the safe side, when purchasing a new printer, invest in one that has more memory than what you are likely to need. For users who primarily print text, 4MB should be a reasonable starting point. If you print mainly color text or photos, 16MB is a good starting point.
