Digital BW, The Print

Antonis,

Let me add compliments for a nice balanced summary...

> Scenario A : For those with 9000/9500 printers wanting support for color as 
> well as bw, there are 2 serious options to choose from: ImagePrint and 
> StudioPrint (or PosterPrint, which is the same thing with Postscript). The old 
> PiezoBWProRIP has many happy users, but it's time to rethink whether being 
> able to linearize on the fly isn't too big a deal to pass up.
>

Besides, to keep continuity with the ProRIP in moving to the 76/9600, one would have 
to switch to R9's product and I'm not aware of an upgrade path for Pro users.

> IP does a great job in color with their proprietary RGB workflow and they are 
> willing to profile papers for you as long as they support the (mostly OEM) 
> inkset . They do an OK job with mono but with the major limitation that they 
> have to make a recipe for an inkset based on fixed ink-loading order, and then 
> provide profiles for you. Yes, they support both platforms, but I'll count that as 
> secondary here. End results have to count for more than the operating system.
> 
One other thing that wasn't mentioned, you pay one price for SP, IJC, R9, etc.  It 
doesn't cost you to add more printers as in IP, which I've always thought was an 
arduous pricing scheme.

> -Only  IJC allows you to use a toner ink to run across the whole scale 
> unpartitioned. For example you can make a gray scale out of 3 grays and a 
> black, then run, say, an orange ink anywhere across the whole scale "on top" 
> of the partitioned gray inks.
> 

IJC indeed does benefit those interested in overall toning options, and those who 
want to tweak curves and partitions.
 
One recent discovery, I was able to get the EyeOne to do continuous scans of the 
linearization patches after finding out from ErgoSoft where to start and stop on the 
strip.  I've also linearized to 60 patches, and have found that the curves are slightly 
different than with 40.  SP is giving about .1 higher dMax than the ProRIP did.

Some of us are encouraging ErgoSoft to add the ability to custom tweak the dot gain 
curve in SP, which would solve some issues in getting legacy files to print with 
uniformity.  It's a feature of their more expensive RIPs, and it's not promised as an 
addition to SP at this time, but we can hope...

I agree with Amadou, its nice to have so many choices afoot...

Phil
http://cirrus-digital.com
http://philbard.com