Choice of rip

[Harry Carpenter]

Rips that provide the useability for large format printing seem to be so ridiculously expensive that I had given up on the idea until I start making something back from my printer.
Qimage seemed like a viable alternative but its only marginally better than using the HP driver, and it is still a complete pain to have to specify a paper size for  print job.
Today however I have heard of the Fuji Imagehunter RIP.
Has anyone heard of this or had experience of it?
It seems to support the Z series printers, as well as Canon and Epson so I would be interested to know opinions and costs if available.
T.I.A.

[rdonson]

I haven't used it.  I've only viewed the video about the RIP here.

Unless I've missed something this seems to be really dumbed down and doesn't offer but a fraction of what Qimage offers.

[Craig Murphy]

If their software is put together anything like their almost unusable HyperUtility3 for the Fuji cameras I would not go near it.  HyperUtility does do a better job of raw file conversion than PS does but the interface is just awful.

[Scott Martin]

What is it about a RIP that you need? Is it nesting? If so what OS are you on? What type of prints will you be making? On what media? What sizes? Tell us your needs.

[Harry Carpenter]

Sorry, been away for a while.

It is the nesting I would need. The ability to just drop a selection of prints on to the page and let it sort out the layout and paper required would be perfect.

[Ernst Dinkla]

Sorry, been away for a while.

It is the nesting I would need. The ability to just drop a selection of prints on to the page and let it sort out the layout and paper required would be perfect.
[{POST_SNAPBACK}][/a]

While I understand that the nesting of Qimage isn't the best around I would not buy any RIP right now for the Z3100 without testing the color quality. With I presume the exception of HP's own PS RIP in the GP model I doubt that any RIP + N-channel profile creator can deliver the color quality of the HP driver + its RGB profiles.

I upgraded my Wasatch SoftRip to 6.2. It has a 16 bit workflow + Z3100 support. 3 profiles were delivered with it but they showed that composite grey isn't replaced by the grey inks. Lots of metamerism, dirty color mixes, heavy ink use, no neutral grey ramp, etc, all what you would expect of little black generation in the profile.
On my request why that Z3100 quality wasn't available and whether the RGB-device setting possible in the driver couldn't be used instead they said that it was no longer used as the quality wasn't better than they could make with N-channel profiles. They provided new profiles that showed a slightly better black generation but still not covering the entire range like the Z3100 driver RGB profiles + media profile. All the artefacts still there. Despite the Z3100 spectrometer support the profiles have to be linearised with an external spectrometer as they are designed like that. No UV filter used I guess when they were created. Linearised with the Z3100 spectro the result was too green. When I reported this back  their answer was that they didn't provide custom profiles. But the ones they made were for the same 3 HP media they have on the site. Generic ones in my opinion. like HP provides them too. I tried the RGB-device mode of the SoftRip but it is impossible to create suitable media profiles without similar issues. The last reply from me wasn't answered, I'm afraid they actually can not deliver the goods so Z3100 support has to be taken with a big lump of salt.

Ernst Dinkla

try: [a href=\"http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Wide_Inkjet_Printers/]http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Wide_Inkjet_Printers/[/url]

[SeanPuckett]

Thanks, Ernst.  I talked to the Wasatch people at Graphics Canada for a while, sounding them out about z3100 support.  I never got any kind of real confidence from them, and some of their answers were disappointing.  Now I know that feeling is warranted.