Kim's Corner
Page 9 of 18

Here’s where the geek in me starts to smile - the technology it takes to route the order through the process from order to confirmation is pretty straightforward - we have touch-screen ordering for the Digital on Demand music - it’s when it gets to the printers that it gets very cool. The print room - what used to be the Gallery manager’s office I think - has three Hewlett Packard Design Jet 5000 ps printers ready to handle the order - you can surf to www.hp.com/go/designjet, to get a look at the technology.

I was amazed as Peter showed me the set-up - during the 100 Mickeys Special Event at the Gallery on the 23rd - explaining, "Whereas, your inkjet, the one that you have hooked to your computer will have a similar system. That will have a print head that prints large drops of ink, this one has a print head that prints drops that are measured in picaleters. The smallest drop of ink that this printer will print is invisible to the human eye. So it’s quality is created by building up, from tiny, tiny drops of ink."

The range of the printers is also amazing, "You can print an image on one of those printers that is 36-inches wide as long as you’d like, 70 or 80 feet long. We’ve also printed, using those printers, a pair of cuff links about ¾-inch by a ½-inch. And the quality is as good as you get if you’d printed it 20-feet-long. So, the technology is very, very sophisticated… We’re having the images scanned into the system at 300 dpi (dots-per-inch determines resolution), but at 24 by 32 inches, so we’re scanning them as very large pieces."

He explained that Eric’s work had some challenges, "We have had to do a standard color saturation across all the images. Now, that’s quite a difficult task when you consider that some of these are very small and the contrast range is huge. But, we think that we have a very accurate rendition… It’s an interesting challenge here… Normally when you’re doing this kind of thing you’re working with fairly conventional art. But, here, you’ve got things as wide as collage… the little pencil sketch, which was then screwed-up. So, when you scan that, you get all sorts of peaks and troughs… makes for some interesting challenges." I was able to watch a few of the images print and the resolution and color saturation are as good as any commercial gicleé print I’ve seen on the market.

Print central - the Hewlett Packard DesignJet 5000 PS - not your average ink-jet printer.
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Eric’s work tends to be bold and dynamic with lots of color and texture, this printing process captures all the nuance of the piece and translates the color balance very nicely. Peter introduced me to the printers and outlined a bit of the technology - I asked - I am a geek after all - so this is a bit of a tech warning - geeky stuff ahead.

The system is currently networked into two printers with a third that can be booted to take-up the slack in periods of high demand. The media path of the HP DesignJet 5000 ps is 42 inches wide and can handle a roll of paper from 100 feet to a maximum of 300 feet - so given enough ink - a single image can be printed to those specifications. They are monsters though - large and heavy- about 6½-feet wide, 2½-feet wide and about 4-feet tall, weighing 250 pounds - as Peter told me that there were "26 steps that lead to the gallery and I know every one of them." And it isn’t just in the size, each printer retails or nearly $14,000. They are high-end and a large investment, but, they will prove to be worth every penny - I think that the DLR fan base can support their outlay.

The print head moves less than a 1/16th of a inch above the surface of the paper - taking less than 10 minutes to complete a 28.5" x 36" print on fine art paper.
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The printer’s integrated system features an embedded HP-GL/2 processor and has drivers for AutoCAD® and Windows. A 20-GB hard disk and up to 256 MB of RAM provide the power and image file storage. Image file types it supports include Adobe PDF, PostScript, HP-GL/2, HP RTL, CALS, TIFF and JPEG files from UNIX®, Linux® and Windows NT® running ZEHRaster Plus. These machines also have HP DesignJet WebAccess software bundled which allows for remote previewing, queue management, accounting information, and media and ink levels - they are virtually people free machines. An amazingly functional and integrated machine.