ImagePrint 8 FAQs


	What is a RIP?
	Lets clarify what a RIP really is. These days, anything that is not the driver that came with your printer is classified as a RIP. Manufacturers make RIP's to satisfy the needs of the people who use them. There are RIP's designed for sign printing, offset proofing, screen printing, and the markets we are most fond of – photography and fine art. The number one function of most RIP's is to facilitate the way a user interacts with their printer, and the features needed are wildly different for each discipline. You’ll notice that we say, the number one function of RIP's. In photography and fine art printing, quality is your number one objective. However, with the growing demand for print related products from both professionals and do-it-yourselfers, users are looking for innovative features that handle most if not all of their print related needs in an easy to use software package. That is ImagePrint 8.
	Will ImagePrint improve the quality of my prints?
	Yes, ImagePrint is going to improve the quality of your prints. It goes way beyond the capabilities of the standard driver that came with the printer. How does ImagePrint do it? It starts with the driver technology. The standard driver that ships with the printer needs to be a jack-of-all-trades. It’s not just made for photography as these printers are sold into different industries, many of which do not use color management. Therefore the standard driver needs to do some internal adjustments to guarantee "good" output regardless of the type of image being fed to it. I like to use this analogy... The standard driver is designed to take a good quality file and print it "good" and a great quality file and print it "good'. ImagePrint on the other hand is designed to print a good quality file "good" and a great quality file "great". ImagePrint users will testify that with ImagePrint they only need to print an image once to get that great print. Plus, we give you features that allow you to do things you just can't do on a professional level any other way, like colorized black and white, and split tone printing. Our new DCM (Dynamic Contrast Matching) technology makes your images jump of the paper. DCM automatically corrects the brightness and contrast for the media you are printing on, eliminating countless adjustments and test prints.
	What makes Imageprint so much better than everything else?
	Well it's a little too complicated to explain exactly how we do it, so here are a few key points most everyone can understand. True 16-bit screening. This means we can resolve all the data in a 16-bit image onto paper. What you get is better highlight detail while still maintaining great separation and detail in the shadows. You are going to see on paper what is really in the image. Larger Printable Color Gamut. ImagePrint does not use traditional linearization techniques. In the traditional method still used by our competitors, each ink is limited in order to control over-inking the paper. The problem with this method is that it restricts the use of the limited ink without regard to areas where the limits should not apply. So in practice you actually reduce the printable color gamut. ImagePrint uses a very sophisticated model that only limits the use of a given ink in a specific range when needed; therefore in areas where the limits do not apply the full use of the ink is possible. Best of all, the user needs no special knowledge or know-how to receive the full benefit of this technology. It’s there for you whether you’re using our provided profiles or profiles you create on your own. If you do choose to build your own profiles, this built-in technology simplifies the profiling process, which makes it almost fool proof. How this translates to the printed piece is in… More accurate, saturated colors. Smoother transitions especially into the shadow areas and in areas where a dark hue needs to be maintained without a sudden shift to black. > Natural and clean skin tones. No grain, no unwanted black ink causing tone breaks in the hairlines and jaw lines. We’ve all seen these issues with inkjet prints and ImagePrint removes these problems. We like to call it "taking the process out of the print". When someone views a print made with ImagePrint, it will be judged on the content of the print not the defects in the printing process. Profiles. ImagePrint is sold as a solution. This means you don't need to purchase any additional hardware or software to achieve the highest quality your printer is capable of. We use our own profiling technology that allows us to achieve a unique reproduction of color and black & white. We provide profiles for all the popular papers for free, and if we don't have a profile you need, we build it for free. Why is this important? First, buying custom profiles is expensive and purchasing profiling hardware and software is even more so. In most cases you'll spend more than the cost of ImagePrint and still won't be able to match our quality. Second, we believe that the industry has advanced to the point where you can actually choose a paper that best fits the image you are printing. This improves the impact the image will have on the viewer. So profile flexibility is a must. Of course ImagePrint is ICC compliant so you can certainly use your own custom profiles whenever you like.
	How does the cost compare to custom profiles?
	ImagePrint starts at just $495 for the Lite version and $895 for the full version. Compare that to a basic profiling system that starts at $1,500 – and you still have to do all the work! Of course you could pay someone else to generate profiles, but at $100 apiece it adds up fast.
	I’m just an amateur, why do I need to buy ImagePrint?
	When you have a limited amount of time at the end of a day or on a weekend to indulge in your photographic hobby, you want that time to be as productive as possible. Printing though the standard driver is a real pain. It’s too easy to forget to select something, and none of the feature labels make sense. You can’t center prints properly and you end up throwing away more prints than you keep. Simply stated, ImagePrint takes the frustration out of printing. It makes the whole printing process enjoyable, which is what any hobby should be.
	I make my living selling prints. Can ImagePrint improve my bottom-line?
	All photographic disciplines need good workflow. That said, you can have the best workflow in the world but the minute you have to reprint bad images, all that time savings and material is wasted. So workflow and quality go hand in. One of the faults of standard drivers is that some images print good and others print bad and from a user’s stand point there is no rhyme or reason to it so it’s something that can’t be controlled. ImagePrint delivers a high quality, consistent output regardless of the complexity of the image. Some features for the professional include. . . Superior color management Gallery quality black & white printing with built-in toning and split toning capabilities Layout and nesting of images Vector Text capabilities Non-destructive image sizing, cropping, tiling, framing, matting and color correcting Creation and use of photo packages for sport, school, portrait and wedding photography Automatic contact sheet and photo size generation Create, save, and name custom workflows for easy access to layouts that are commonly used A spooling system that logs, saves and archives a history of print jobs allows easy access to jobs for reprinting and rebuilding to the layout window for changes and edits. Profiles for all the industries top medias in 5 color temperatures and black & white --- all for free Phatte black for the Epson 7800/7880/9800/9880 printers that allows printing from both Photo and Matte black without expensive ink change-over
	Why isn’t there a PostScript option?
	ImagePrint no longer contains a PostScript option and for good reason. Today’s page layout workflows are typically PDF. The older PostScript interpreters have done a poor job of maintaining PDF and more specifically Acrobat compatibility. Too often you’re faced with a PDF file that opens and looks perfect in Acrobat but the PostScript interpreter still can’t process it. With ImagePrint we’ve moved away from traditional PostScript because of those issues. Instead we have an option we call PTAPP, which stands for Print Through Application. This option allows the user to print directly from any application to the ImagePrint RIP. All text, line art and graphics will be rasterized in high resolution and properly color managed on its way to our RIP. This option also makes it convenient to print from applications such as Apple’s Aperture and Adobe’s Lightroom.
	Can ImagePrint keep track of who’s using the printers?
	Absolutely. AuditPrint is an additional utility that can be used to track various aspects of each print job. For example, students with various login names can print jobs through ImagePrint. Administrators can then track a number of variables including paper usage per student. A text file is then generated and can be imported in to virtually any spread sheet or data base application used by the administration. AuditPrint is free for the asking.