Brother MFC-J6910DW slowwwww printing on larger jobs!

[Melissa2012B]

I got this Brother MFC-J6910DW about 6 weeks ago, set it up as wireless, and soon noticed that it was taking way too long on larger print jobs. I'm a small solo home office business here, no big network and no one else using the wireless, but we have it set up so that my sister can also use it at the other end of the house, and two Roku boxes, which have never been in use during the day when this happens, so don't really need to be considered. I'm the only one on a computer when this happens.

So I went to print a 40 page job about 10 days ago, still in wireless mode, and it sent the Windows 7 part of it ( the little screen box with the bar showing it's printing ) in about 7 seconds or so, then nothing. So I went and looked at the printer device bar, that shows status, and it's sitting there processing the 40 page job into a huge size, looked like about 80 megs at one point. This went on for about 20 minutes, then it appeared to have stalled. I tried it a couple of more times and it finally got the job printed after about 20 minutes each time!

So I contacted Brother support and they told me that wireless is too slow a connection for large print jobs ( 40 pages is large?! ) and I should switch to a USB cable, which would work.

So I went out over the weekend and got a USB cable and installed that.

On Friday, we had a job come in that's 125 pages. So I just went to print it with the USB connection, which I got working over the weekend, and it's printing now, BUT took 22 minutes to even START! WTF!
It appears to have turned this 5 meg PDF file of 125 pages, into 54 megs in the final print que!

But I had a Canon MF3240 and once printed a 600 page job, and THAT started printing right away! ( yes that was on USB )

So what's with this printer?! Has anyone experienced this with a Brother?

Here's a screen shot of the print job I just started at 11:53 AM. It's printing now at 12:29 PM:

lakewoodcolorado.net/photos/Brother%20Print%20Job%20at%201227%20PM.jpg

 

[Melissa2012B]

Just heard back from them, and my reply follows:

> Dear Melissa,
>
> Thank you for taking the time to write back in regards to your
> MFCJ6910DW. We understand the machine is printing a 125 page document
> slowly. We will be happy to assist you with this issue and apologize for
> any inconvenience it may have caused.
>
> With a document that large being printed in reverse order the machine
> has to spool the entire document before it can begin to print. If you
> would like the machine to print the document right away it would have to
> print in regular order.


Regular order is BACKWARDS though! It would mean that page 125 would be on the top of the pile and page 1 at the bottom! I'd have to sort through every page to fix it!

Who designed such an insane system?!
_______________

This is a nice printer, but WHAT a nightmare!

 

[Laser Tek]

I do not know if this is the problem with your printer since yours is still new right? But maybe you could consider this. The heat rate of a fuser is affecting the speed of the printer. The faster the heat rate, the faster the print. Check if there's any defect and maybe you need to change that or something else must be the problem.

 

[Melissa2012B]

No, the actual pages don't take so long to print, it's the processing in the spooler. The job gets sent from the PDF to the spooler in a few seconds, no problem. But THEN the spooler processes it, in the case of that 125 page job, for about 20 minutes, BEFORE printing even STARTS. Then the actual printing is a fairly normal speed per page. I think the 125 pages took around 6 minutes to actually print. But I noticed that spooler process is also expanding the file size by about 10x, so a 5 meg file winds up looking like around 55 megs if I watch the spooler box. By spooler box, I mean, when you hit the final Print button, it has a progress bar box that takes a few seconds to say it was printed. That's the program sending it to the spooler. The spooler is the memory place on the computer that actually processes it and buffers it to the printer. That's the box in my windows tray that I can click and open up if I want to see the print progress, and that's where this whole thing is taking the 22 minutes for the 125 page job to process.

 

[Melissa2012B]

This is the reply that I just got from a Brother supervisor and my response. This appears to be their last word on this problem:

> Dear Melissa,
>
> Thank you for taking the time to write to us. I understand that you were
> needing to speak with a supervisor in regards to the Slow Print/Reverse
> print issues that are occurring with your MFC-J6910DW.
>
> My name is Kara, and I am a supervisor here at Brother.

Hi Kara.

> I will be more
> than happy to provide more clarification on the issue that you are
> experiencing.
>
> Since this model is an inkjet machine, the printed pages come out of the
> machine face up. This is because the ink on the page has to take time to
> dry. If the page came out face down, the printed page could smear if the
> ink touches the paper catch tray or the desk. Because of this, Page 1 of
> your document will always be on the bottom of the stack unless you
> choose the Reverse Print feature in the driver. Reverse Print causes the
> document to be printed in reverse order (last page printed first) so
> that the document will be in the correct order when removed from the
> Brother machine.
>
> When you print large documents without the Reverse Print feature
> enabled, the job begins spooling to the Brother machine, but the entire
> document is not sent to the machine all at once. As the pages print, the
> rest of the document continues to send to the machine.
>
> When you print a large document with the Reverse Print feature enabled,
> the entire document has to be transferred to the Brother machine since
> the last page now has to be printed first. Because of this, printing
> speed will be slow when using the Reverse Print feature.
>
> Because the documents that are being printed are large, it takes time
> for the entire document to be transferred over to the Brother machine
> for the last page to print. The slow printing can only be resolved by
> not using Reverse Print, but this will cause your documents to be out of
> order.


This is disappointing. If I'd known this, I would have bought another brand. This is a design flaw, as who in the world would want a stack of documents printed with page 1 at the bottom of a stack, so they have to sort them all out?


I'm a former electronics R&D technician and IMAGINE that this might be solved with improvements to the printer driver, but am not sure. I previously had a HP 8500A, also an inkjet, and it didn't do this, so HP must have solved the problem.
*
> The only option that we can offer to have faster printing and the pages
> printed in the correct order is to use one of our laser machines.


Not an option. I previously used lasers here in my home office and it was causing a chronic cough and loss of my sense of smell, until I switched to inkjet. But like I said, this is the first time I've seen this, and your company should be able to solve this. Your machine seems far better built than the HP, which worked for 8 months and then broke a calibration strip and I found out that HP's are considered "throw-away" printers and can't be fixed.


> The
> laser machines are designed to print the pages face down, which always
> causes Page 1 to be on the top of the stack. Laser machines differ from
> inkjet machines in that they print using powdered toner that is fused to
> the page with the heat from a fuser inside the machine. Since liquid ink
> is not used, there is no danger of the page smearing with wet ink, so
> the machine can print the pages face down.


I know all that.


> Once again, we do understand that this is an inconvenience, but
> unfortunately, there are no other settings that we can adjust on the
> MFC-J6910DW or the computer to avoid having slow print when printing
> large print jobs using Reverse Print.


Well it really should be implemented to print in a normal fashion, with page 1 at the top of the stack, without having to reverse print, like other brands of inkjets already do. I'm frankly shocked that your engineers implemented it this way.


> If you have any further questions about the Slow Printing/Reverse Print
> features of the Brother machine, please respond to this email and let us
> know.
>
> Sincerely,

Thanks.