By: Erik Vlietinck
Tue, July 10, 2007 - 11:22:00

http://www.proofmaster.com
Score:

Ever wondered how much ink a regular printer driver of a photo or large format inkjet printer throws on the page? With the environment increasingly being a crucial factor in our decision-making, you should. Given a photo inkjet with the four colours Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black (light hues included), the answer to that question is: as much as the paper will absorb.

Printer manufacturers like Epson and Hewlett-Packard build colour and ink tables into their printer firmware. Those tables ensure that colours look right on supported papers and ink is sprayed onto the paper in sufficient amounts so that saturation is guaranteed. Ink is where printer manufacturers --even with large format printers-- make their money. The regular printer driver therefore will never use ink sparingly, even when it is possible to do so.

Alternatives for regular printer drivers exist only for the semi-professional and professional colour inkjet printers --starting with the Epson R2400 and the HP Photosmart Pro B9180. These alternatives are Raster Image Processors or RIPs. RIPs come in many sizes and formats, but they all have a couple of characteristics in common:

- a RIP enables you to organise your printing workflow

- a RIP supports ICC colour profiles and therefore supports at least basic proofing

- a RIP enables you to set the ink usage on a per-ink basis.

If these features are not present, you’re not using a RIP, but a Postscript driver for a non-Postcript printer. You may call that a RIP if you like, but it’s useless for controlling the print process, and that’s what this article is about.

Many commercial photographers will use a RIP to at least proof their photos. Proofing allows them to see what the output will look like on a printing press. Using a RIP also allows them to maximise colour output (gamut), while maintaining correct colours across all papers they care to use --whether or not these are supported by their printer manufacturer.

For example, take the HP DesignJet Z-3100 large format printer. This printer has been the talk of the year, and rightly so. It comes with 11 colours and a gloss enhancer, and has one of the largest colour gamuts available. HP has done its best to make managing and driving this printer as painless as possible, and it has succeeded by building into the printer a GretagMacbeth spectrophotometer for calibration and a printer driver that is almost as versatile as a RIP.

A Printer Driver By Any Other Word

The DesignJet Z-3100 can indeed be used without a RIP by any photographer or graphic designer, and the colour output will look absolutely fabulous. But if you want to save on ink, a RIP will be necessary after all. Large format printers as the DesignJet Z-3100 can be driven by a whole range of RIPs, but one that towers over all the others must be ProofMaster without a doubt.

I am currently testing ProofMaster, and even in the preliminary phase of my review that I’m currently in, I can’t but be impressed with this RIP’s feature set and power. It is also one of the only RIPs (if not the only one --I’m not 100% sure) that will drive each colour of the DesignJet Z-3100 independently. Most competing RIPs will enable you to manage the CMYK inks, but not the the additional colours independently. ProofMaster will. The result, as you can imagine, is much better control over the colours, the gamut and the ink limits.

The amount of ink that is sprayed onto the paper is entirely controllable with a RIP like ProofMaster. Since I’ve begun investigating RIPs, I’ve always heard people --even those people who should know better-- that RIPs are too difficult to set up for small photo studios and for anything else than layout departments that must proof their design.

I don’t agree, not anymore. ProofMaster does have a learning curve, but it’s not a steep one, and customers --unlike journalists and reviewers-- do get initial training before they take the box with them. Besides, if a user has some good basic knowledge of setting up a colour output system, I’d say he/she can work with ProofMaster in a matter of hours.