STUDIORIP DROPLET TO PLATE 24/36
Computer to Plate (CTP) system that produces conventional offset plates of laser quality (175 lpi), plate sizes up to 91 × 150 cm, low cost consumables (typical price $6,5–7,8/sqm). Proven in the field by its successfull application in many printshops.
Advantages
- Small investment, about 10% of a laser imagesetter
- Cheap consumables, about 50% of the conventional film production costs
- Eco-friendly, simple operation (no chemical processing)
- The printer can be used for proofing and color printing
Ink and film quality
- DMax > 5.0 for the UV range
- Excellent water resistance (the film resists under water for a long time)
- Excellent scratch resistance (incomparably better than the original EPSON inks, unintentional scratches almost impossible)
Image quality
- 2880 x 2880 dpi
- 30 – 175 lpi halftones with sharp dots
- The smooth halfones and sharp edges are achieved by our Dynamic Density Modulation, Edge Enhancement, Ink Spread Compensation and RIP-based MicroWeaving technologies
- The registration accuracy is 0.1 mm for cutsheets and of approx 0.2 mm on roll media for jobs below 400 mm length
RIP features
- The RIP was designed for the high end market (laser CTP devices), having a much wider range of features than the inkjet RIPs
- Trapping, imposition, ganging, user-definable pre-press marks, dispro, client-server architecture, zoomable and color managed preview, dotmeter tool etc.
- User-friendly interface
- High processing speed by MMX assembly code
Printing Speed
- 2x higher speed than the competition with our -3 channel printing technique which uses the MK and PK channels together
- 2880 x 2880 dpi: 3 sqm/hour on normal quality settings (further quality impr ovement on lower speeds)
- 1330 x 1330 dpi: 10 sqm/hour (recommended for 60 lpi or below)
Dynamic density modulation
- Films or papers can only take about 40% of ink on 2880 x 2880 dpi, 100% ink causes ink flow
- A 40% ink density is achieved by removing 60% of the droplets
- Competitor RIPs apply uniform density control across the entire halftone percentage range, resulting in broken halftone dots (see the above illustration)
- StudioRIP applies different ink density to the different halftone percentages
- This way small halftone dots have no pixels removed
- The result is sharp, compact, round dots across the entire halftone tonal range
Ink spread compensation
- Thin lines and texts print too thick on inkjet printers due to various factors (droplets of 35 microns, mechanical inaccuracy)
- StudioRIP compensates this by making objects thinner by 1-3 pixels, this way the actual result will have the desired thickness
- Very thin lines are protected from being removed by the Ink Spread Compensation algorithm, the line thickness is not allowed to fall below 2 pixels (or any other user definable amount)
Edge enhancement
- Printing the edges will full ink density on 2880 x 2880 dpi creates a local ink excess that will makes all lines thicker but sharper
- The wrong thickness will be then corrected by the Ink Spread Compensation technology
- The result is a sharp edge with accurate line/text thickness, just as sharp as the output of a laser imagesetter
RIP-based interlacing (MicroWeave)
- The printer builds the 2880 dpi image from 720 dpi head passes with an interlacing algorithm called MicroWeave
- This algorithm is optimized for high speed color prints, and is not suitable for high LPI color separations
- StudioRIP is the only RIP bypassing the MicroWeaving module of the EPSON printer firmware, controlling the head directly
- This allows StudioRIP to improve the quality on the expense of the speed by using less nozzles or having more passes