Printing characters in a matrix as a string
I would suggest to create a 1000x1000 testcase and measure the performance before the optimization process. Please use the following test generator:

import os
import random

f = open('1000x1000.in','w')
f.write('1000 1000\n')
ALPHABET = 'abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz'
for _ in range(1000):
       f.write(''.join([ALPHABET[random.randint(0, len(ALPHABET)-1)] for _ in range(1000)]) + '\n')
f.close()


After that just run it and measure the performance of your application. I got about 47 ms on my pretty old C2D E7200.