Megarip is a high speed raster image processor (RIP) designed for the digital photographic, exhibition, short-run poster and screen print industries. Built around a cutting-edge colour management system, Megarip is packed with features and applications created for photographers, design professionals, or anyone who needs consistent, high quality prints from desktop through to grand format printers.

 

 

Colour Management

Professional photographers, design studios and screen printers should have access to the latest in colour management technology. Megarip is built on the same full 16-bit engine that powers Serendipity Software's world class Blackmagic and Veripress proofing systems.

Megarip's colour management system is ICC v4.2 compliant, utilising paper profiling and a selection of advanced ink limiting and linearisation algorithms to ensure your images are committed to paper, vinyl, or canvas, exactly as you envision them.

16-bit colour control faithfully reproduces vivid, realistic landscapes and subtle flesh tones. Sophisticated gray balancing maintains all the nuance and drama of black-and-white images, providing blacker blacks and whiter whites. Black Point Compensation ensures the full dynamic colour range of your photographs and images are correctly converted to your printer's gamut and that prints maintain all the fine shadow detail of their source material. Megarip is all about data integrity and colour fidelity.

 

16-Bit From Pixel to Paper

Photographers working with RAW-sourced image files and designers manipulating those files know that 16-bit processing provides over 250 times the colour depth of 8-bit processing. Megarip performs all processing in 16-bit rather than the customary 8-bit, from imaging and colour management, through to scaling, screening and rendering.

A 16-bit engine gives Megarip finer colour control and allows it to calculate the differences between black and white, light and dark, with far greater accuracy. The result - high precision image reproduction, smoother transitions into highlight and shadows, and elimination of visual banding in gradients and vignettes. This improved render quality means images print the way they are designed; that photographs print with all the colour, depth, tonality and realism as their subjects.

 

Gray Balancing

Neutral gray balance has long been a goal in printing. Creating gray tones without any colour cast using a CMYK (or simulated RGB) printer ink set is not a simple task. Until now, this has been a task left to ICC profiles, with varying results, depending on printing conditions.

Megarip's linearisation algorithms are designed specifically to balance your printer's CMY or RGB gray output, while bringing its ink channels to a linear state. Essentially, this means your printer output is gray balanced before it hits the output ICC profile. Megarip does the heavy lifting before creating your ICC profile, allowing the profiling software to fine-tune your gray output with greater accuracy - producing optimal gray balanced prints.

 

RGB Support

For photographers concerned with data integrity and image fidelity, Megarip allows files to be rendered in RGB using industry standard ICC profiles and rendering intents. Megarip also supports RGB print modes for supported RGB-enabled printers. Media configurations use RGB output ICC profiles and custom gray-balance focused linearisation.

 

Rendering Effects

Megarip features a range of rendering effects that can be applied to a job. These effects include mirroring and rotation, nesting (intelligent image fitting and scaling), cropmarks and borders, tiling for large poster images, and unsharp masking. Watermarks can be applied to images to protect your copyright, or your company logo can be placed anywhere around a job.

 

SoftProof

Megarip's SoftProof application uses ICC colour management of the monitor to display colour accurate previews at full output resolution, before committing to print.

 

Multicore Processing

Built on the latest code and taking full advantage of the increasing power of current and future multi-core CPUs, Megarip is made to be fast... very fast. Integral multi-core CPU support allows multiple jobs to be processed simultaneously, while multithreading ensures all CPU cores are hard at work, even on single jobs. Megarip has the fastest imaging and rendering times of any RIP on the market. Saving on processing time means more time printing.

 

Printing

Megarip provides several methods to submit jobs for print, suited to different environments and workflows. Images can be submitted directly or Megarip can automatically process and print jobs dropped into a DropFolder. For those who like to keep it simple, drag and drop a file onto a DropSpot for instant output to a calibrated printer setup.

Media and print configurations can be added as standard Windows or Mac OS X printer destinations, allowing desktop design applications to print straight to Megarip. Printing to network printers is easy - Megarip supports multiple network protocols including Bonjour/Zeroconf.

Megarip also features AirPrint wireless printing from iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch devices. There's no software or drivers to install - simply select the device from the printer list, dial in the number of copies and watch it go.

 

Total Printer Control

Megarip uses a paper profiling system that individually characterises print media based on colourspace, output resolution, printer ink set and the paper being used. Users can assess and select which dots will be fired by the printhead for each ink channel, choose from a number of intelligent ink limiting methods, and linearise a printer based on a customisable set of gradation curve points.

Paper profiling gets the most out of your printer's available gamut, allowing accurate reproduction of wide-gamut photographic images and Pantone^® colours used by popular desktop design packages. Control of the printhead and ink limiting also means a paper profile can be optimised to use the least amount of ink to achieve the colour densities required. For businesses using a lot of ink, Megarip helps to keep operating costs down.

 

Plug and Print

Megarip has pre-configured, downloadable Media for a number of popular medium and large-format inkjet printers, resolutions and paper combinations. Load them into Megarip, linearise your printer and you're ready to print!

 

Screen Printing

Megarip features a screen print mode, designed for printing film separations with an inkjet printer. Files are separated into individual plates and each plate is printed as a black separation with halftone dots applied at the colour's respective screen angle.

Users have the option of combining two or more overlaid inks for each plate to increase the density or alter the hue of the output film separations. Screen frequency, dot shape and screening angles can be defined and plates printed using standard halftone screening, or Megarip's SuperCell mode, which produces better dot shape and higher quality output.

 

Unlimited Printers

Megarip supports all major brands of inkjet printers. Printer drivers are licensed on a per manufacturer basis. Megarip comes with a driver suite of choice and allows for output to any supported printer model made by the selected manufacturer. Extra printer licenses are available separately. In addition, Megarip can run as many local or remote printers as are available on your network. If your business uses a preferred brand of printer, the software will install ready to run all of them!

 

Nesting

Efficient use of media resources has a direct effect on a business' bottom-line. Megarip allows users to make the most of available print media with its Nesting feature. Using automatic nesting, print queues are able to collect, intelligently arrange and auto-rotate incoming jobs to best use the space available on your print media, minimising waste. Nesting can be configured according to percentage of sheet coverage, number of jobs, minimum or maximum media length, idle wait time, or can be initiated manually at any time.

The Studio application allows images to be nested manually. Jobs are submitted to a queue, waiting to be printed. Studio's visual interface enables the jobs to be placed and arranged on a defined media space. Positioning jobs is as easy as a drag and drop. Images can be spun, sized, shuffled around, placed in a grid or tiled. Users can even create and store libraries of standard nesting templates into which images can be placed. When the layout is ready, the nest is printed, exactly as it appears on screen.

 

Load Balancing

If your studio or site has multiple printers, Megarip keeps all of them printing continuously and efficiently.

Megarip tracks the number of jobs assigned to each output device, their total print area, progress status and print time. Using load balancing, print queues can be grouped and incoming jobs automatically allocated to the printer able to print them first. The same function can also assign a job to be output simultaneously by all available printers, without the need to resubmit - perfect for short-run poster work.

 

Media Control & Tracking

Megarip's media tracking feature means never having to guess how much paper is left on the roll. Media configurations include the option to define sheet size and quantity or paper roll width and length, then track both the total area of jobs printed and the amount of media used.

If your business uses multiple paper types for printing jobs, Megarip allows you to assign a Media paper type to a printer so it only prints jobs for that paper. Other jobs are processed and placed in a holding queue until the appropriate paper type is loaded.

 

Multi-Platform Enabled

At Serendipity Software, we know that different studios and print environments need different computer, operating system and network solutions. Megarip is made to fit into any workflow and runs on any combination of Linux, Windows or Intel-based Mac OS X systems, straight out of the box.

 

Megarip Editions

Megarip is the total solution for turning files into prints, made to seamlessly fit into your workflow and fulfil all your output needs, big and small. There's a Megarip edition suited to any photographic, design or production environment, each capable of printing a select range of these file formats: TIFF, JPEG, PSD, PNG, Scitex CT, Serendipity Blackmagic Image plus composite Postscript (Level 3) - PS, EPS and PDF.

 

 

 

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