We have a color laser printer in the office. It does an OK job printing color photos as far as quality; but it takes a long time. I used Acrobat to compress the photo into PDF format, and it printed out much faster. However, the color and detail quality is poor compared to the original document. Is there any program out there that will compress the color images to a smaller size thus increase the speed of printing, yet maintain the original quality of the image? Any help is appreciated. Peter

Peter...this is an interesting subject for me as I have been in the photographic industry for some 30 years and have made thousands of "large" prints... What do you mean by large???...11x14??? 3ft x 5ft??? What kind of laser printer???... Do you want to do a dot matrix and print large photos that way???... Other stuff...Any time you compress an image file, irregardless what type of file, jpeg or whatever...it compresses the file by taking some info out of the image...as well as eliminating certain "dead" areas of the image file...(wow, bad word to describe it)... But the final result is the more you compress it, the worse it is going to look... If you are going to do a lot of photo quality image printing...you will probably need something more that the "normal office computer and printer"... You'll need to consider BIG hd's, LOT's memory, firewire, production printers, etc... I have one graphic computer, 100 gig hd, 500 meg ram, hi end graphics card, an Epson printer that uses special b/w dyes to print very top quality b/w photo images onto a varity of paper stocks...for someone who has spent a lifetime in photo darkrooms, the quality of this output is very competitive to actual photo paper and processes, etc... And when I print in color, it looks damn good too... Any, I'm rambling...hope this helps a little Steve

LARGE COLOR PRINTER

Believe it or not, PowerPoint does an excellent job of sizing and printing, while maintaining a pretty good resolution. Give it a shot. I was surprised when I found out just how good it did. Chase