Digital BW, The Print

I would have expected the Epson driver to be very well tuned for its inks
and papers.  (Wishful thinking?)  Re profiles, there is/was a debate going
on on the Colorsync forum as to whether the number of observations used by
Bill for his profiles was of any added benefit.  The conclusion, I believe,
is that it likely does but it would be extremely difficult to prove the
point.  Having made the above comments re the Epson driver, it is still
interesting to note their "partnership" with Colorburst.  (Colorburst's
terminology.)  FYI CB is about to incorporate Monaco's CMYK profiling engine
as a free upgrade, so CB is about to go up quite a notch for colour guys.

I would have said the key advantage of a RIP is (1) for advanced B&W and (2)
for using non-Epson ink sets, particularly non-clones, and media.  For (1),
Epson's Adv B&W substantially narrowed the gap left by the old Epson colour
driver and there are a couple of cheaper alternatives, QTR and IJC/OPM, but
each of these rely on the Gimp dither engine.  I have no idea if the extra
options offered by SP make the expense worthwhile.  For (2) a RIP almost
becomes compulsory unless the Epson driver ink limits just happen to work
well (unlikely for non-clones).  For colour, it seems the bulk of the battle
is being fought between SP and CB (at least in the non press environment)
with SP offering head-spinning functionality but at a massively greater
price. CB dumped their Quadtone effort when they "partnered" with Epson.


> From: Greg <dfaprinting@...>
> Reply-To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
> Date: Mon, 13 Feb 2006 04:01:03 -0000
> To: <DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com>
> Subject: [Digital BW] Re: StudioPrint v12 and quads
> 
> --- In DigitalBlackandWhiteThePrint@yahoogroups.com, "John Vitollo"
> <jvlist@...> wrote:
>> But seriously will StudioPrint be able to outperform or match the
> Epson driver with Bill
>> Atkinson's new 4000+ target profiles?
>> 
>> John V.
>> 
> 
> Well, if you are using CMYK output profiles, then yes it might as you
> now have some control over the black generation. Running through the
> Epson "black box" driver will only let you control as much as they
> allow you to control. With the past Epson drivers, when you print
> black, you get a mix of C, M, Y, and K. If you print through a RIP
> with CMYK output profiles, you can customize the black generation so
> that when you feed it RGB 0,0,0 you get only K as the output. No
> matter how many patches you use, you can only do that with the Epson
> driver if it allows you to do that, and I don't think it does allow
> that. Same can be said for the other neutral RGB tones. This assumes
> that you have a neutral set of K inks, with the Epson inks you will
> always be using some color component to produce neutral tones since
> the Epson K inks are not completely neutral.
> 
> Most of the decent RIPs also have a different (custom) dither that
> may give you a more desired result. Then there is the ink limit
> feature of a RIP that will help you use any paper or fabric that you
> can safely send through the printer. Some textiles need a lot of ink,
> far more than the Epson driver will allow. Other papers need far less
> than the Epson driver allows, which will give you a low gamut and
> possible puddles on the paper. Then of course there is the maximum
> print length limit of the Epson driver (but that has nothing to do
> with the color accuracy).
> 
> A RIP isn't for everyone, but I still feel the benefits are worth the
> money for me (at least for the older printers). The benefits are
> certainly getting smaller as the printer hardware improves...