Hello I am a Computer techy for a Graphics Design shop.
We have a Kodak 1565 printer that is run by a very old Fiery Hardware RIP.
Lately it has been unreliable and guess who has been asked to find a cheap
solution.
Is there a good software rip to power this Kodak 1560?
What is a software RIP, and how does it compare/contrast with a hardware
RIP?
Software and hardware are both ALWAYS involved.
Let me ask you this: suppose you come up with software that RIPs your
files into a format that this beast can take. How are you going to
transmit the RIPd file to the laser engine? You don't see any kind of
parallel or serial or Ethernet port on the back of that thing, do you?
Nope. It's a proprietary cable.
Laser printers are simple things, and every laser printer you have on
site is comprised of two things: the marking engine and the controller
board. In your desktop printers, these things are all wrapped up inside
one set of covers such that it looks like what you've come to know as "a
laser printer". But there's a piece of hardware in there, running
software, that takes high level print language in via Ethernet or
parallel and RIPs it to rasters. It then transmits these rasters using
whatever proprietary connection it needs over to the marking engine.
Would you take the controller board out of your LaserJet and start
poking around for "a software RIP" to replace it? No, you wouldn't.
Well, your color copier is the same thing--except they've put the
controller on the *outside* of the covers instead of the inside. It's
still hardware that's running software, and it still needs to send the
rasters over a custom connection straight to the marking engine.
http://www.ebay.com is your best bet for a replacement.
I have setup a new P4 with hypertheading and Windows XP Pro dedicated to
powering another large format printer.
The large format printer is a line printer that takes in lines of data
via parallel port. The color copier is a page printer (that's what
laser printers are more appropriately known as) that has to take the
entire page image into the marking engine before the marking engine can
start up. There's no parallel connection for that, any more than
there's a parallel connection inside your LaserJet between the
hardware/software controller and the marking engine.
If I could put the software on that computer and get rid of the old slow
Fiery Hardware I would be considered a God in my shop.
You'd need at the very least the proprietary copier connector card and
cable to plug into that Wintel box, in addition to whatever software you
may load onto that Wintel hardware. (There, I said it: you'd have a
hardware RIP when you were done with it all.)
