Re: ImagePrint Question
Re: ImagePrint Question
- Subject: Re: ImagePrint Question
- From: Graeme Gill <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 08 Dec 2004 05:45:26 +1100
- Organization: Color Technology Solutions Pty. Ltd.
Cris Daniels wrote:
that). Both HP and Epson have plenty of money to beat off RCT if the
claim is garbage. They are also fully capable of writing code that
doesn’t infringe; that they chose to license the technology and use it
in production machines is how they opted to handle the situation. I
This isn't often what happens. The fact that HP & Epson are big, is one
of the reasons they often settle. They can threaten a long expensive
lawsuit, and as a result negotiate a small licensing fee. This is
often better than risking loosing a suite.
There is doubt given the broad claims usually made in patents,
and the low level of scrutiny given to many patent applications,
and the random nature of the outcome of a lawsuit, that they
could write code that clearly doesn't infringe. Why take that risk ?
never said it was a bad idea or that BNM was junk technology. My whole
point was that Epson is licensing the RCT technology now, and according
to the RCT’s own press release, that is true. That’s all I ever said. I
never gave it a date, multiple legal conditions, or anything else. End
of story.
But you were implying that because they licensed it, they were using it.
There's no reason to think that, and there is reason to think that
in fact they are not using it, since they seem to have licensed it
simply to settle a lawsuit.
Hey, you were the one that said “It's certainly not easy to get
screening patterns better than what Epson manages, since they have had a
lot of time and opportunity to figure their own device out. The handling
multiple dot sizes is a bit of a trick.”
My first interpretation of that comment was “Epson has the staff, the
money, and the information that no small RIP vendor is going to have”. I
was citing Colorbyte as an example of one person that manages to do it
better than all of Epson (which we can assume by your statement uses
more than one programmer and has access to all the information they
need). You might be on the same level as the Colorbyte developer (I’ve
never seen Cyclone), that’s great, I was trying to give a real example
since you made mention that it wasn’t so easy.
It took various vendors (and my knowledge only covers Colorbus
and BestColor with any certainty) a little while to get on
top of some of the banding problems inherent in the Epson
engine, particularly those made worse by multilevel dots.
Epson had much earlier access to these engines (probably several
years earlier access), and so had lots of time to figure out
what was going on, and how to fix it.
Epson probably had a small team working full time for several
years on such things as what screening will work best with their
print heads, and have the budget for all sorts of sophisticated instruments.
I had something like a couple of weeks to figure out the problem
of multilevel dot screening and banding, and I did it the easy way -
I re-examined what an Epson engineer had told me 9 months before
about how best to drive multi-level dots, and I examined the output
of the Epson driver closely. I then configured our screening to
produce similar behaviour. Now my assumption would be that many
of the other RIP vendors (like BestColor, Colorbyte etc.) probably
found themselves in a similar position, and more likely than not,
solved such problems in a similar fashion. Now maybe I'm wrong,
and there is someone super-bright working at such a RIP vendor,
who on their own, and with a fraction of the support, can figure out
all this stuff from scratch; but if they are responsible for half a
dozen other major subsystems of a RIP, I wouldn't imagine they had
the time ! :-)
Whether Colorbytes screening is better than Epson, I can't
judge since I've never seen the output. As for my own efforts,
I'd judge them better than Epsons in some ways, and worse in
others (And my screens were pretty fast). In the end, it didn't
matter, since the overall output of the RIP was most often
judged superior to what could be got out of the Epson drivers.
Graeme Gill.
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Colorsync-users mailing list (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
This email sent to email@hidden