Subtle shift underway for printer specs

What? Printers aren't the sexiest, most dazzling tech topic ever? Well listen up, because a tiny snippet of the fine print on those printer spec sheets is potentially set to change the devices -- and the way you shop for them -- in a serious way.

The change revolves around that age-old term "pages per minute," used to describe how quickly a printer can spit pages out. For example: My laser printer is officially specified by the manufacturer at being able to print 24 pages per minute, but I can assure you in the real world it doesn't even come close to that. Maybe it can do 12 or 14 ppm, max.

So why does the company say 24 ppm? Because there's no official standard for measuring pages per minute from printers. Manufacturers can print at lower resolution, can print pages with just a bare smattering of text on them, and can otherwise skew the tests to favor good results.

And of course, they do, because ppm is one of the first thing any buyer looks at when purchasing a printer (it's one of the few quantitative measurements the industry can offer), so vendors do whatever they can to pump that number up as high as possible.

Now an alternative is in the works, and Canon, with its PIXMA MX860, is one of the first -- if not the first -- consumer printers to adopt the standard. It's called "images per minute," and it calls for a standardized test pattern to be used in lieu of the old "print whatever you want" system that was the hallmark of the "pages per minute" measurement.

Canon explains the standard, called ISO/IEC 24734 and 24735, in this PDF; essentially it involves printing a standard set of Word, Excel, and PDF documents, and measuring the amount of time it takes. Black-and-white and color get separate ratings. (For its part, the MX860 printer gets 8.4ipm in B&W and 5.6ipm in color.)  

Will ipm catch on? So far no major manufacturer has switched its ratings from ppm to ipm across the board; even Canon hasn't changed all of its printers' specs to ipm ratings. Here's hoping that everyone sees the light, though -- the glut of $200, 38ppm printers on the market is really getting silly.