Epson 7600 with Harlequin rip

[JanZ]

The boss is looking into purchasing a new proofing device. Our existing Harlequin rip would do dual duty as a que for the imagesetter and the Epson. (I was told it could only print to one machine at a time.)

Is anyone running a similar configuration? Any insights into possible problems? Any opinions on quality of proofs from the Epson?

Thanks!
Jan

[Lammy]

This is from memory from a few years ago. . . but I do believe Harlequin only has a setting for one imaging device. even if it connects via a network. So if you have two devices you need two boxes running Harlequin. There really isn't an easy way to swap from one device to another either.


Though it may have changed since then.

[JanZ]

Thanks for the reply. We were told that the Harlequin will only print to one device at a time. The Epson has software that updates the Harlequin for easy switching. (Or so we've been told.) If it causes enough of a bottleneck for our department, the boss said he would investigate putting in a second rip...

Jan

[mediasource]

Originally Posted by JanZ

The boss is looking into purchasing a new proofing device. Our existing Harlequin rip would do dual duty as a que for the imagesetter and the Epson. (I was told it could only print to one machine at a time.)

Is anyone running a similar configuration? Any insights into possible problems? Any opinions on quality of proofs from the Epson?

Thanks!
Jan

We are running an ECRM Harlequin RIP with an epson 7600. The 7600 is just a plugin for the RIP. All you do is set up another page setup for the epson and print to it. It is true you can only send to one or the other. You would only need a second box is you didn't want to que documents. Also I was told they have discount pricing if you need the second box. Ripping the composite color file on the RIP also takes a lot longer than seperations.

Hope this helps.

-tyler

[JanZ]

We've been running the Epson for a few weeks now without problems. We have found that ripping time is the same for composite or seperated files. The sending time from the Mac, of course, is faster for composite files. Jobs sent from the Jaguar machine are really fast sending!

We were very pleased to find that we didn't have to change the output in the devise manager each time we sent to a different output. The jobs que up together but image to the devise picked in the chooser.

Jan

[Lammy]

I was happy to see that one of the BIGGEST improvements with OS X over OS 9 was networking speeds. Working in a shop that server dependent it was like getting a whole new computer!

[T-Rex]

I worked a while back with a Harlequin RIP going to a Prestek DI press and an Epson 7600. The connection to the DI press station was direct Ethernet and the connection to Epson was one of the printer ports I believe.

We didn't have tons of jobs goint through at one time, but the daily level of jobs was OK. We could RIP jobs to either one based on our queue setups on the RIP, the RIPped sep files to the DI we had to copy down to the DI imaging station manually (i.e. File Manager drag and drop). The Epson proof files would go from the RIP to the Epson print queue, and just waited for the previous job to finish imaging. I never saw any real bottleneck issues there. The only issue I knew of was that funny things would happen if the pressmen tried to image plates while we copied files down to their station.

Setup the Epson to go the higher dpi for quality purposes, otherwise, the clients may not like the "lo-res" look of the diffusion dithering. It's pretty course at the 360 (or whatever it was?).

[JanZ]

The Epson looks good enough at 720 for our usage.

Jan