Easy way to print posters and banners, even fine art giclee prints, full color, any size, with a large format color printer.

Instead of having an outside print shop do your posters, banners or fine art giclee prints do them in-house with a wide format ink jet printer such as Roland HiFi, Colorspan Iris or the more economical Hewlett-Packard. If your image has a strong pattern to hide the dot structure you can also use an Encad to produce signs and posters. Museums, art galleries, can create unique fine art giclee prints, posters and banners as can any business that needs advertisements or point of purchase signs. But what large format printers can do the best job? What is a fine art giclee printer?

With a printing press you had to print 500 or a thousand or more posters as minimum print run. But what if you only need a dozen fine art prints, posters or just one banner?

Now, with digital technology, you can print as many, or as few, posters and banners as you need.

Lettering can be changed from one poster to another. You can make individual lettering for each particular situation.

An EFI Fiery RIP processes all this and together with the Encad Nova Jet Pro they produce eye-catching signs.

Here are rollouts of two Late Classic vases from Tiquisate, Museo Popol Vuh, Guatemala (www.maya-archaeology.org) done with an early generation Encad (only 300 dpi at that time).

The newer Hewlett-Packard DesignJet series of printers produce better quality photographic images than Encad so we have switched to using HP DesignJet wide format printers. We are now reprinting all our images on these newer HP printers (we have the 2800 CP and also the HP 1055).

That's Nicholas and Andrea in the F.L.A.A.R. office (you can tell from all the books this is a research institution). These are the results from the Encad printer, which was great for its day (1997). Now we are spoiled by the improved image quality of the Hewlett-Packard DesignJet printers. After all, this is the year 2003 now, and what was okay in 1997 is practically archaic today.

What photo paper do we select? The media (photo semi-gloss) is from Rexam Image Products, rexamimageproducts.com.

Questions about RIP? Check out the descriptions of RIPs on this web site and on www.FineArtGicleePrinters.org. Our survey of RIPs documents that PosterJet (DCS Software) is the fastest and easiest to use. If your business requires color management then BEST is a good choice if you do proofing with your wide format printer.

What printers are capable of doing fine art prints? Unfortunately, not an Encad, they are for basic signs and posters. If you want better quality it helps to have the more costly Roland or ColorSpan, or the economical Hewlett-Packard DesignJet. The ultimate fine art giclee printer is the Iris from Scitex but by the end of this year you will be able to get outstanding quality from other printers for a fraction of the cost of the Iris.Visit our page on the NovaJet 1000i.

Most recently updatedJuly 11, 2001.