The Big Picture - April 2013 - (Page 27)

keyword RIP Tide Nearly 50 RIPs to help you accommodate a torrent of work. As this issue’s columnists point out, today’s print providers typically have to deal with the ebb and ﬂow of a shop’s work (see pages 16 and 18). At times, you’ll be contending with low tide, perhaps barely ﬁnding enough work for the staﬀ to take on. Other times, however, the jobs will come in fast and furious – a “rip tide” of jobs that has the potential to capsize your operation if you don’t have the capabilities to handle them all. Enter the RIP. Today’s RIPs boast more features than ever before, allowing many of them to be complete workﬂow solutions that can drive multiple shop tools – yes, printers, but also prepress and ﬁnishing tools and more. In addition, the RIP itself can often perform functions unheard of just a few short years ago: from color management and ink savings to job management and more, including dovetailing with mobile and Cloud applications. To help you in selecting your best RIP, we asked RIP suppliers to provide us with information on each RIP model and its features. For purposes of the charts on the pages that follow, we’ve limited this group to “third-party” RIPs – those RIPs typically purchased from a non-printer OEM – because these are generally engineered for more than one manufacturer’s printers. There are exceptions, of course, when a company that produces RIPs is also producing printers; in the case of EFI, for instance, we’ve strived to only list those RIPs that can be used on a variety of machines. Various printer OEMs also produce (or have produced for them) RIPs for their own machine models or utilize machine-/company-speciﬁc editions of a RIP. Although we’re not listing these here, we certainly encourage shops to investigate all options when it comes to RIPs. As with last year’s RIP charts, we’ve updated the listed features to include: white and metallic ink support (W, M), G7 support, step and repeat, hot folders, Webbrowser interface, consumables savings and tracking capabilities (Sv, Tr), cutting options, and more. Keep these points in mind as you study the charts: • We only include RIP models that are geared toward or can handle wide-format output, according to manufacturer specs. • We list more than two dozen RIP features, and indicate if each feature is standard (S) or optional (O) on that particular RIP. If a cell is left blank, you can assume that the feature is not oﬀered. • Printers and ﬁ le formats supported: In the interest of space, we list only the number of printers the RIP supports; see the company’s website for complete information. This is also true for ﬁ le formats. • We list a price when provided by the RIP supplier. • The “Notes” section contains additional information not included elsewhere in the charts. Finally, keep in mind that these charts are designed to be a staging area for your RIP research. Your next best step is to contact the RIP manufacturer/supplier to see how a speciﬁc RIP might best suit your individual operation and needs. www.bigpicture.net 27 http://www.bigpicture.net

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of The Big Picture - April 2013

The Big Picture - April 2013
Contents
InSight
Wide Angle
UpFront
Inside Output
Business + Management
Becoming a Pace Setter
RIP Tide
Success with Dynamic Signage
R+D
Explorer

The Big Picture - April 2013