QTR-Quadtone RIP

--- In QuadtoneRIP@yahoogroups.com, "George Butch" <GButch@...> wrote:
>
> I have found a couple dealers who still stock the Pulse at a
> reasonable price.  I am looking for some guidance here.  Should I buy
> this apparently discontinued product, and is it really the best
> moderately priced tool for my two stated purposes?

Well, I had the most interesting experience with my new Pulse, and
traded some other Pulse stories on dpReview.

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1003&message=21563726

To summarize: my particular Pulse came from Adorama. It was factory
sealed, not used, but it was about two years old (X-Rite doesn't care,
their warranty starts from the purchase date, not the manufacturer
date). It needed a firmware update, and some of the packing material
had outgassed a substance that we Pulse users have come to call
"slime" all over the printer calibrator and monitor calibrator. It
cleaned right up, and the cleanup was necessary because the slime was
also on the outer lens and was keeping the Pulse from calibrating.
Once cleaned up, I checked the Pulse for accuracy against a big bench
spectro, and it was on within 1 delta E (very good, beyond your
ability to notice visually).

Now, this aside, the Pulse requires a few tricks for working with
monochrome RIPS. Normally, the Pulse can't read strips on a monochrome
target, it has to be used in patch reading mode, which is much slower.
In order to read in strips, the firmware in the Pulse needs to read a
color coded strip at the top of a target called the "Target ID" or
TID, and three color coded blocks at the beginning of each row of
patches called the "Row ID" or RID. (The latest Pulse firmware
provides a "no TID no RID" mode, but no software currently supports
this). Several of us have been getting around this by printing targets
on a color printer, then cutting out the TID and RID and pasting them
on a monochrome target.