What is Page per Minute (ppm) Speed?

Page per Minute Printer Speed

One of the common features that you will always come across with whenever you are looking a computer printer is the page per minute speed. There are two types of page per minute printer speeds that are always provided. The first is the page per minute speed for black text and the other is the page per minute speed for color images.

What is Page per Minute Printer Speed?

As the term implies, this is the number of pages a particular printer can print in one minute, depending on whether the user will be printing pure black text, color images or both. Many companies have used this as a tool for marketing because printing speed is one of the features that a buyer looks into.

What Affects Page per Minute Speed?

After a printer is purchased and is used, the first thing that a user notices is that the printer would often print relatively slower than the page per minute speed that is advertised by the company. Here are a number of reasons why this happens:

Quality of the printed material. Printers are capable of printing out both low and high quality texts and images. The higher the setting used for the printed materials, the slower the printing speed of the printer. This is because more printer ink would need to be dispersed on the paper to achieve the level of printing quality specified by the user.
Paper Size. Another reason for the difference in the page per minute printing speed is the size of the paper where the text and the image will be printed on. As such, printing text and images on the materials on a legal size paper will have a slower printing speed as compared to printing the same text and image materials on a letter size paper.

Other factors that could affect the page per minute speed of the printer are:

Printing mode
System configuration made by the user
Complexity of the document (percentage of colored images against black and colored text)
Page coverage
Software used to create the document

How is Page per Minute Speed Computed?

When a printer manufacturer would computes the page per minute speed of a specific printer model, this is done by printing basic text using the lowest print quality the printer model would be able to do. This is for both black text and colored images. As such, the advertised page per minute printing speed of a specific printer model could be almost twice as high as the actual page per minute printing speed of the model.

Fastest Printers Available Today

Some of the fastest printers in terms of page per minute printing speed available in the market today are:

HP OfficeJet Pro K550 (37 for black text/33 for colored images)
Canon 2175B002 Pixma Mp210 All In One Printer (22 for black text/17 for color images)
HP Photosmart D7260 Photo Printer (34 for black text/33 for colored images)
Samsung ML-4551NDR Monochromatic Laser Printer (45 pages per minute)