PSQL command line print speed

Is there a way to speed up the actual line-by-line display of the psql
console in version 8.4?

Queries which perform in a few milliseconds through a driver (psycopg2 in
this case) can take several seconds or minutes to complete in the console,
seemingly just due to it printing lines at a very leisurely pace (in other
words, this is not the delay caused by the query itself, often it starts
printing almost instantly but spends a very long time just writing output).
While overall application performance is unaffected, simple admin tasks and
poking around the data take longer than I would like as a result. Is there
any way to improve just the display/write performance in the console?

Thanks for any insight,
Adrian