PPM (pages per minute)

In printing, PPM is an abbreviation that stands for "pages per minute." The abbreviation is used in marketing to describe printer speed.

If a vendor advertises a speed of 15 PPM, the vendor is saying that the printer will print 15 test pages in one minute. It is up to the vendor, however to decide what content to put on a test page and what print mode to use for the test. It is not unusual for the ink coverage on a test page to take up less than 10% of the available print area or for the test pages to be printed out in low resolution to inflate the PPM numbers.

To provide an apples-to-apples comparison for printer productivity, the International Standards Organization and the International Electromechanical Commission have issued ISO/IEC 24734, a standardized test for normal mode printing that requires mixed content with an average ink coverage of 11% of the printable page, not including margins.

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