One of our best sellers has been funny engraved coasters. They’re 1/8" thick but engraving 6 takes 32-37 minutes! I have tried increasing the speed up to 2500, 195LPI, and 70% power but it doesn’t make a difference. Even a png vs svg doesn’t speed it up. Am I asking too much of my GF or is there a way to keep the quality up and speed up the whole process? Thanks!
Its all down to engery/time/surface area imo. you can group them up to try and save time eliminating the start and stops between the coasters and having things arranged horizontally across the bed but it still needs to put the same energy over time into the material to get the results you want. You will need to run tests on the coasters to find your limits, I usually start at full power and adjust speed and lpi settings to get the result i want and for me that ends up being the most efficient use of time. I made my own test patterns but there are a few available in the free laser designs section that work great as long as you are able to interpret the results. I also start at 1000 speed to avoid large margins on the left and right of the dashboard and really have not seen much benefit at all of speeds higher than that when you factor in acceleration and deceleration of the print head.
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Sounds about right. A full bed engrave can take 3-5hrs, sometimes more.
As stated above, there’s little benefit in going to really high speeds. The limiting factor is needing to put down enough power to get a decent engrave.
Not sure what you’re referring to by “even in Beta”… engrave speeds are set by the hardware. There is no “Beta” speed change/increase.
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You might be able to experiment with the margin optimization feature in manual settings (for a raster engrave) to speed things up.
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The Beta speed up is only in processing the design that is sent to the Glowforge. I does not speed up the actual hardware.
If you could convert the “engrave” into something that could be “scored” that could speed up the process dramatically. It really depends on what your image looks like.
well holy crap, I did NOT know the beta speed was the processing and not the actual speed of the laser. That explains so much now, but I do feel seriously derpy!
It’s always tough to know someone’s knowledge level, so forgive me if you already knew all this stuff. But I just wanted to make sure you knew that the thickness of the material, the power* setting nor the file type has any impact on the engraving time. (*Power can be indirectly associated with it because using higher power can let you go faster.) And 5 min for a coaster doesn’t seem all that slow to me, but I guess it’s all relative because I regularly do3 hr engraves. 
And like @primal_healer mentioned, how you combine your file can help speed things up. The colored lines are the path the laser head takes.
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Thats a great graphic
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