Intelligent pass control

[mark in tx]

What is it exactly?

I've read the info from Roland and I don't think they have done anything to the operation of the machines.
I've been told by a Roland technician that it is nothing but a tweak to the profiles for Versaworks.
I've not seen any difference in printing quality.

So, can somone boil it down for me?

 

[Pacific Coast Sign]

Your Roland tech is wrong about the Intelligent Pass being a "tweek" to profiles..it has nothing to do with the profiles. The intelligent pass is a improvement to the way the ink is laid onto the media by how the variable size dots are output. For the older VP series and older XC series it was made with a firmware upgrade. It allows higher speed printing without banding issues. Yes, there IS a notable difference in print quantity especially at higher speeds.

 

[cdiesel]

Well, he was half way correct. RIPC uses different profiles, but it is also a different firmware to allow it to happen.

What it does is it layes C & M (lc and lm in printers with six colors) down a little in each direction to lessen the effect of C sitting on top of M in one direction, and M on top of C in the other direction.

If you were seeing no banding before, you probably won't see a difference. Make sure you're using the RIPC profiles. One thing it also does is prints at 720x540, which is a little faster than straight 720x720.

 

[mark in tx]

Thanks for the info!

It was just bugging me for some reason today.

 

[digitalsolutionsok]

Yep just a chime in on this discussion I would much rather have RIPC on a Soljet than interweave on a ValueJet, the ink limits on the mutoh profiles that I have seen are way over the roof.

Chris a question with RIPC does it get a true 20% gain in speed from the old firmware and profiles?

 

[tanneji]

Oh yeah. Our banners are twice as fast and our standard vinyl is about a 50% increase. Great stuff except that occasionally the RIPC profiles actually band worse. I haven't figured that out yet ....

 

[cdiesel]

I'd say 20-25% increase in speed is about right (standard to standard setting). The nice thing is you can print high speed banners with very nice quality, whereas before there was very noticeable banding. You're actually running different profiles/pass settings, so you're comparing two different things (old 720x360 vs new 540x360 I believe), but the new settings when you look at it like that are at least 50% faster.

I haven't seen any issues with the RIPC profiles banding worse. We had one (PMP3) that prints very weird gradients though.

 

[digitalsolutionsok]

The graident issue is a known problem with versaworks....

If only they would box the XJ series with postershop? That wont ever happen, but as far as gradient and the best dot pattern per pass ONYX is what I like and see printing good production quality output.