Software RIP vs hardware RIP?
My first RIP was an EFI Fiery RIP kindly sent to my Digital Imaging Technology Center by EFI (to use to evaluate and review an Encad NovaJetPro, this was about 5 years ago). This was very clever of EFI to send this RIP outright because this RIP is still fully functional and will probably never stop working. There is virtually nothing that could possibly go wrong with it. This is because there is not much inside the attractive case besides air. Hardware RIP is simply a separate box, actually a computer, and actually a cheap low-MHz PC (though not labeled as such, but it usually has an outdated Pentium processor inside). This is called a hardware RIP because EFI (Electronics for Imaging) has already loaded the software into the computer hardware for you. So you never see any software, indeed the box has no CD slot. It is a dedicated RIP, dedicated solely to the (usually one) computer that it is made to coordinate with. We have experience with four hardware RIPs. All our experiences are r
