For as long as I can remember, printer performance has been reported using terms like Return to Application (RTA), Time to First Page (TFP), and Time to Last Page (TLP). Over the past few years, RTA has disappeared from many reviews as processing power on the PC has increased and returning access to the PC during a print job has become a non-issue.

These age old terms may be about to change. The same sub-committee of ISO who recently released several toner and ink yield standards that have been adopted by the printer industry has just released ISO 24734 - Method for measuring digital printer productivity.  Like other ISO methodologies, there are comprehensive instructions as to how to set-up and run the test, specific environmental conditions, and defined test targets. But this standard also looks to change the way throughput performance is reported (you may notice in the title of the spec that they don’t even use the term “performance”, but instead “productivity”).

ISO defines three test suites – “Office”, “Advertising and Graphics”, and “Feature Performance”. The Office Suite contains documents from Word, Excel, and Acrobat Reader. The Advertising and Graphics Suite contains files from InDesign, QuarkXPress, PowerPoint, and Acrobat Reader.  And the Feature Performance Suite contains two files of varying complexity printed from Acrobat Reader. The Feature Performance Suite is intended to be used to compare different features of a printer (different PDL’s, paper sizes and weights, and finishing options).

The Office Suite is required and the Advertising and Graphics Suite and Feature Performance Suites are optional.

Three performance measurements are required to be reported.

First Set Out Time (FSOT) is the “number of seconds between the initiation of the job to the complete exit of the last page of the first test set.”

Estimated Saturated Throughput (ESAT) is the “rate at which a device produces pages measured from the complete exit of the last page of the first test set.”

Effective Throughput Time (EFTP) is the “average speed at which a device produces pages measured from the initiation of the job through the complete exit of the last page of the last test set.”

We will be updating PageSense in the next couple of months to support this new standard so our customers will be able to automate the running of these test targets and report the performance (I mean productivity) of their devices using these new terms.

We’ll see whether printer companies start reporting with these terms or if consumer or buyers start asking for this data.