Need to print something big, no bigger, no no really really BIG.
Well there's a great tool for just that and it's called ...ahem... Rasterbator.

Once you get past the name you see what a great tool this is.
Rasterbator will take virtually any image rasterize it then output it in a very large way.

How big is big?
Well I haven't tried one this large yet but it look like it can output images on a grid of US letter sheet that's 10 sheets tall by 14 sheets wide or 85 x 110 inches. Pretty big.

You can use the tool online or download a copy, both options are free.

That cool free online version of PhotoShop Express we showed you a few weeks ago will now save your pics right to Flickr.

Props to Gizmodo

An article in yesterday's Business Week magazine entitled "The New Push to Get Rid of Paper" looks at the 33-year-old paperless office concept. Despite continuing trends toward environmental stewardship and electronic communications, paper usage has grown substantially over the years. The article states that in 1975, the average U.S. office worker used 62 pounds of paper a year. By 1999, that figure peaked at 143 pounds, but in 2006 it was still at 127 pounds.

View the article on the Business Week website or click here.

Some people use black & white printers because they tend to cost less than color printers. But what is the opportunity cost of lost effectiveness? Color increases brand recognition by up to 80 percent, according to a study by the University of Loyola. Color can improve readership by 40 percent, learning from 55 to 78 percent, and comprehension by 73 percent.

One printer who previously printed in B&W and recently bought a high speed color printer has this to say: "It is important for me to be able to see that what I am doing on the monitor comes out the way I intend, rather than a toned down version of it. I am now crazy on color. The pictures come out incredible. It really grabs your eye. When the staff shows people the new design, we get a lot of ‘wows!’ - myself included!”

Sources:

• "Business Papers in Color. Just a Shade Better", Modern Office Technology, Jul 1989, Vol. 34, No. 7, pp. 98-102
• Embry, David, "The Persuasive Properties of Color", Marketing Communications, Oct 1984
• Johnson, Virginia, "The Power of Color", Successful Meetings, June 1992, Vol 41, No. 7, pp. 87, 90.

Churches are in the business of communicating and reaching out to others. Maybe your church prints common applications like bulletins, newsletters, letterhead, and offering envelopes. There are more of course. How do you print these documents?

• non-copyrighted choir music
• Christian education and discipleship training
• youth and teen groups
• stewardship campaigns
• outreach material
• sermon notes, study book material
• vacation bible school material and promotion
• visitor packets
• door hangers
• baptism certificates
• monthly financial statements (statement of giving)
• new member orientation
• singles ministries
• pageants and concert programs
• retreat info
• pastor’s letters to members
• special offerings
  
• building campaigns
  

Hello Everyone,

Customers sometimes ask me: "How can I simplify the printing of this complex job?"

The answer may be to create a queue for that particular print job.

Here are the steps:

Editing queue settings:

1. Login as Administrator
2. Select the queue from the queue list and click [Edit] icon.
3. Change the print settings in the [Queue] Dialog.
4. Put a check mark on “Queue priority” for settings that you always want to use, regardless of any settings that have been made through the print driver.

That's it! Now you are ready to send a print job to that queue. When you send a print job to that queue, it will come out with all of the job settings that you selected.

To access that cue, file, print, properties, workflow, Queue selection, select that queue.

Do this as many times as needed for repetitive print jobs, you can make as many queues as you need.

Good Printing

Normally printing double-sided requires an attachment to your printer called a "duplexer". It is possible however to print double-sided using a regular printer, just by re-inserting the papers into the regular paper feeder tray. This article shows you how.
Steps

1. Make a note of how many sides in total you want to print.
   
2. Print all the odd pages first. This involves choosing the appropriate option on the print dialog.
   
3. Collect the printed pages together into a block.
   
4. If there is an odd number of sides in total from step 1, remove the last page of your block and set it aside somewhere safe.
   
5. Square up all the pages in the block by tapping it on a table top until they are level.
   
6. Take the block of printed pages, hold them the right way up facing you as if you were about to read them and turn them over as one block from left to right. You should now be looking at the back of the last page of the block.
   
7. Empty the paper feeder on the printer and reinsert the block into the printer, this way round. The top of the already printed pages should be underneath and facing into the printer.
   
8. Print all the even pages, with the "normal" option ticked. The reverse option is usually a check-box which prints the pages in reverse order, starting with the last.
   
9. Add the missing last page, if you removed it earlier.
   
10. Congratulations! You should now have your double-sided printout in the correct page order.

• Depending on your printer model, you may need to re-insert the paper a different way round. The above method works on a Samsung laser printer.
  
• Use the regular automatic paper feeder tray, not the optional manual feeder tray on the top.
  

You’re new on the photo staff at your city’s newspaper. You’ve just come in from shooting a great set of photos from a fire in an apartment building downtown. After rushing into the newsroom to submit the photos by deadline, you plop in front of the photo staff computer. Now what? Here is a comprehensive list of directions on how to choose and edit a set of photos that are ready to run on tomorrow’s front page.
Steps

1. First, skim through your photos and choose your best five. Expand this to your best 15 if the Sun is running a slideshow online. Maintain variety: some close-ups of fire victims, broader shots of the burning building, and action photos of a fireman rushing out of the fray. If the photos are blurry, too dark, or simply lack to tell the story, cut them out.
   
2. Next, open Adobe Photoshop and open your chosen photos.
   
3. Provide photo information. Choose File > File Info. In the window, enter your name in the “Author” entry. Write a brief caption in the “Caption” section describing where and when the photo was taken, what’s going on in the photo if it is not obvious, and the names of people in the photo if possible.
   
4. Adjust image size. In the top menu, choose Images. In the drop menu, click on Image size. Check the width and height in the “Documents” box (third and fourth entries) to be sure neither number is greater than 10 inches – adjust accordingly. Then, change the resolution (fifth entry) to 200.
   
5. Change image mode to CMYK color. In the Images menu, hold the mouse over Mode and select CMYK from the menu. This may change the color composition slightly.
   
6. If the lighting could be better, adjust the levels. Go to Images > Adjustments > Levels. You will see three arrows along a horizontal line. The one on the far left adds more shadows, while the one on the far right brightens highlights. The one in the middle adjusts mid-tones. While looking at the photo, move the arrows from right to left accordingly to create just enough contrast in the lighting without being overly dramatic. Err on the side of light, since printing presses tend to run colors slightly darker than what appears on the computer screen.
   
7. If needed, crop the photo. In the toolbar on the left, select the square crop tool. It should look like a square object with a line going through the middle. Click and drag the object over the desired area, removing extraneous material. Adjust the cropping area by dragging any of the four corners from this selected area. When satisfied, hit ENTER. Avoid cutting off people’s limbs or cropping a location that could leave out important contextual information.
   
8. Sharpen the image. Go to Filter > Sharpen > Unsharp Mask. In the window, maintain “Threshold” at 0, “Radius” between one and two, and the sharpening amount around 75 percent. While looking at the photo, adjust the sharpening amount by dragging the arrow just below it to the right or left. The trick is to sharpen the image as much as possible without appearing too grainy.
   
9. Save every photo as a .tiff in art folder on your publication’s server. After clicking File > Save As, go to the Art folder on the server. Look for drop menu with the file format and change it to .TIFF. Hit “Save.”

• While you can do many more creative things with your photos in Photoshop, you will only use the software as an enhancement tool for purposes of a news publication. If you greatly alter the lighting or flip the image to face the opposite direction, you will be breaching the ethical standards of photojournalism. As a rule of thumb, the photo should only be altered as much as what you would do in a traditional darkroom, which includes cropping and basic lighting adjustments.

• These instructions reflect the procedures used on The Diamondback photo staff.
  

Article provided by wikiHow, a collaborative writing project to build the world's largest, highest quality how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Edit a Photo Fit for Print. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

Power consumption in office printing devices largely depends on the copier, laser printers or MFP's print speed or copies per minute. With copiers, the toner is adhered to the paper and fused with a high-temperature roller called a fuser roller. The power consumed in this fusing process accounts for about 60% of the total power consumption of copiers.

The conventional fuser consumes about 60% of the total power consumption when the copier is in the ready mode. This is because a certain amount of electricity is consumed to keep the fuser warm in ready mode; if it was not warm the copier would have to reheat the fuser every time you wanted to print or copy and this would take a long time.

It is interesting to note that most printing devices consume more power while in standby and sleep modes than they do the whole time they are actually doing the printing. This is due to the number of hours that they are in these modes while sitting idle during the day or overnight. One way to save energy, and it's catching on, is to unplug the device or turn of the power bar at night.

Grayscale halftoning converts a continuous-tone image (e.g., 8 bits per pixel) to a lower resolution (e.g., 1 bit per pixel) for printing or display. Grayscale halftoning by Error Diffusion uses feedback to shape the dots into high frequencies where the human eye is least sensitive.To approximate a gray level with only black or white pixels requires an algorithm that turns pixels on or off to achieve the correct average overall level. Gradations are represented by dot density. The greater the density, the darker the image, and the lower the density, the fainter the image is.


In Dot Screen halftoning, gradations are represented by changing appearance of dot size. If the dots appear larger, image is denser; and if they are smaller, it is fainter. If Dot screen is selected on a printer, Screen frequency (lpi)] and Screen angle (degrees)] can be set.

Learn more at these sources:
Source 1
Source 2

LPI is short for Lines Per Inch, which is the number of dots per linear inch on a page. The line screen (or LPI) of a printer determines the amount of detail in a photo and determines the levels of gray in a halftone. Generally, the higher the LPI, the better the photo unless it is higher than the printer can allow. Following are max recommended LPI settings for printers of various DPI (dot per inc) capabilities:

• 600e DPI printers – 70 LPI
• 600 DPI printers – 85 LPI
• Common offset presses range from 80 LPI to 200 LPI

You may have not known it, but as RISO customers, you are ahead of the environmental curve!

This was really brought into focus this week, while I was working with some RISO sales reps in Wisconsin. One of the reps showed me a document from the Madison Wisconsin City Council meeting from the office of the Mayor, which laid out their plans for a mandate of "Green" policies regarding printers and copiers. The main thrust of the document is to give direction to city employees making decisions on copiers, printers, and fax machines which support sustainable, environmental printing methods. To see an article about this, copy this into you web browser: forwardwi.com/forward_docs/uploaded_documents/why_wisconsin/wi_printers_move_toward_green_printing.pdf


Another rep in another Wisconsin city piqued the interest of a buyer by presenting RISO's "Print, Live, Save, Green" program.

These types of "Green" policies are becoming EXTREMELY important as everyone concentrates on being environmentally responsible citizens. These policies are also getting to be more and more common. The HUGE impact that printing has on the environment is getting noticed.

Now, as RISO customers, you already know this, so, Congrats! You were environmentally responsible before it became fashionable.

No matter what printing device you use, choosing the right paper for the job will have an effect on the print quality. For duplicators, both smooth and vellum finishes are acceptable, depending on your application. Smooth finish is better for printing photos because its smooth finish reduces dot gain for lighter ink coverage (lighter photos). Vellum finish is better for heavier ink coverage (reverse backgrounds or heavy graphics) because it absorbs the ink into the fiber of the paper. This minimizes set-off or “bleed-through” has a softer finish so it creates higher dot gain

Ever send a simple one page job to the printer only to find three pages when you got to pick it up? Titles, banner ads, ubiquitous URLs all wasting your paper, ink and money.

If this sort of waste drives you crazy check out GreenPrint. The software highlights and removes unwanted pages while still allowing manual intervention when desiered. So yes, you can still print out all those exciting legal disclaimers for your late night reading. You wild thing you.

GreenPrint also sports a very cool integrated PDF function.

GreenPrint provides a simple solution to printing to PDF. This preserves the document format including web pages without wasting paper. This PDF writer is also incorporated into the print preview so any document can easily be saved to file (after eliminating wasted pages) rather than being printed. For most users, this will also eliminate the need to buy a separate PDF writer such as Adobe Acrobat which can retail for up to $499.

It is important for users to know that they have to accommodate for dot gain on any ink-based printer. Dot gain can make a photo look too dark. Depending upon the contrast and density of the photo, you may want to enhance the shadows (make them darker) and enhance the highlights (make them brighter). Very dark and very light shades are not affected by dot gain as much as midtones. Midtones are greatly affected by dot gain. These adjustments can be made in any of a variety of photo editing and page layout programs, such as Adobe's PhotoShop and InDesign or Microsoft's PictureIt or Publisher. Once the photos are adjusted, then they can be placed in the document and sent to your printer.

A halftone is a method of representing different shades of gray with dots of solid color. The more closely spaced the dots, the darker the color. The density and pattern of these black and white dots are varied to simulate various tones. The resolution (or number of dots per inch), determines how many shades of gray can be produced.

A print service provider in Texas serves ad agencies and high-end corporate accounts, with a focus on premium graphic services. One day a sales rep made a cold call on the owner of the business and sold him a RISO digital duplicator. Later, the firm placed a bid against five other printers in a major account RFP for 1.3 million Christmas cards and envelopes to be completed in three months. The envelopes required were short runs and were to be personalized with return addresses in spot color. The firm owned two HP Indigos, but had no ability to run envelopes. Of all bidders, this printer was the only one bidding ‘digital printing’ of envelopes, while the others bid with litho presses. A major factor in the RFP award was the use of ‘environmentally friendly’ supplies provided by RISO. The organization bought two RISO RZ990s, two PS7R-5000’s, and two print cylinders. A great application and a great solution for all. To learn more about RISO’s digital duplicators, visit http://us.riso.com.

An inplant print manager who produces postcards and flyers for his internal customers was having trouble improving response rates on his direct mail campaigns. He was using a high speed black and white copier, which was pretty fast and produced good quality. However, the reliability of his equipment suffered as his volume increased. So he investigated RISO's MZ790 digital duplicator and decided to buy one. After four months, he had printed a total of 604,000 copies without a single service call. Now all of his mailers are printed in two colors. “Two color documents are more attractive to the reader” he says. Since using the MZ790, he saw a 20% increase in the response rate to his mail offerings

Buyers Labs Inc.(BLI) held a Testing Advisory Committee (TAC) meeting, which was attended by senior technical representatives from several major manufacturers of MFPs and copiers. A topic of discussion was the recommended maximum monthly volumes published for OEM imaging devices.

Interestingly, most agreed that the maximum monthly volumes stated for these devices are not consistently achievable and that actually printing at these high volumes over time would likely result in more frequent service and PM calls. One OEM rep stated that if these high volumes were sustained over time, the equipment may not actually last a three-year lease term. Another said it was impossible for some products to even reach the stated volume in a normal eight-hour day. Yet another compared it to driving a car at full speed eight hours a day for a month. It was acknowledged that in most cases these volumes are unrealistic and that products could approach maximum volumes on an occasional basis but not continuously.

How About RISO’s Recommended Volume?

The attending committee member from RISO commented that RISO does not overstate its products' volume capacity. He said that RISO duplicators actually can and do perform at the stated 500,000 recommended monthly volume without resulting in additional service issues. Most everyone in the conference smiled and agreed that RISO digital duplicators were an exception. Of course, RISO customers have long been aware of the robust capacity and outstanding reliability of RISO digital duplicators.

Many of the manufacturers will plan to re-evaluate how they publish their numbers and BLI has also changed its terminology in test reports to avoid confusion. This article is in the August 2006 issue of Digital Imaging Review and is available through a subscription to bliQ. For more information on RISO printers and duplicators, visit http://us.riso.com

Think fast: which paper is heavier - 60 lb. index or 80 lb. cover? Well, it is 60 lb. index, of course. Paper weights can be confusing. So here is some helpful info about paper from the good folks at Micro Format, Inc. The website: http://www.paper-paper.com/weight.html -

•Basis Weight -- The basis weight of a paper is the designated fixed weight of 500 sheets, measured in pounds, in that paper's basic sheet size. Important: the "basic sheet size" is not the same for all types of paper.

•Caliper -- Caliper refers to the thickness of a sheet of paper expressed in thousandth of an inch. This measurement is taken with a micrometer. Generally, the relation between caliper and basis weight ....the greater the caliper (the thicker the paper), the greater the paper weight.

•Equivalent Weight -- While different paper types have different basic sizes, papers can still be compared by using equivalent weight.

As you may have seen in the news already, RISO has partnered with the Arbor Day Foundation to plant 100,000 trees in US National Forests over the course of the next four years. Reflecting RISO's commitment to the environment, these trees will help replenish national forests damaged by fires or disease and will be planted on behalf of RISO’s customers and resellers.

We also plan on increasing awareness within our industry by working with the Arbor Day Foundation to provide our employees and our resellers with gift trees that can be planted locally throughout the US.” An example of this can be seen at our Pittsburgh branch as reported by the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and the Pittsburgh Post Review


Below are pictures of the tree planting held on May 10th, 2008 in conjunction with the Pittsburgh Parks Conservancy. Trees were donated by RISO and our Pittsburgh Branch employees and family members did the planting.

Hello RISO People,

When using the HC for complex print jobs, sometimes it can be a challenge to figure how how to print a re-occuring job. There is an easy way for you to get what you need, without remembering what settings it takes to do it.

Ok, so here is the example: You have a newsletter that you print every week. You want it to be made into a duplexed booklet with folding and stapling. You finally figure it out, it's exactly what you want. Then next week comes around, and you can't remember how to do it. There are 3 ways to make your life easier:

1. If this is the only job you do, you can make those job settings, their own defaults. You can do this by clicking on "Start", "Settings", "Printers and faxes", then RIGHT click on the HC normal cue and click on "Printing preferences". You now see a window that looks just like the print driver. Select the settings you want, then click "Apply" and "OK". Now, the customer doesn't need to get into the properties to print their complex job. Just file, print, and ok.



2. Or, you can create a custom queue for them. Essentially, you can create special instructions on the IS700C to do certain things. So, how it would go, the next time your customer printed the job, they would simply send it to that custom queue, NOT the normal queue. (instructions for how to do this is on pages 12 and 13 in the Utility guide). A customer can have as many custom queues as they want.



3. Or, use one of your 10 "Easy Buttons". You get the job set up the way you want and then click on the dropdown menu on the bottom of the print dialog box that says "Job Settings" you then select an unused lines (when you first install them, they all read: Unnamed 1, Unnamed 2 and so on). Then click "save button". Next time the customer wants to do that job, have them click "file", "print", "properties", then select the custom settings from the drop down menu you have created click "Load"....easy! You can find additional directions on pages 14-15 in the users guide.

Good day, RISO fans. Most people are aware that digital duplicators are ideal for printing run lengths of more than 25 copies per original. But some organizational buyers mistakenly feel that they don’t print long runs in their offices and are only aware of the single copy or ‘just a few’ copies that their staff prints every day. These single-page and short-run applications might make up the majority of copier/printer usage, but not always the total volume. All it takes is a few long-run applications to justify the lease of a new RISO digital duplicator.

Hello everyone. From time to time, I would like to share some real-life stories about organizations who bought RISO digital duplicators and high-speed inkjet printers. In today’s post, let’s discuss a print service provider in Texas. This machine order resulted from a cold call from a sales rep.

The organization is commercial printer whose primary markets are ad agencies and high-end corporate accounts, with focus on premium graphic services. The firm placed a bid against five other printers in a major account RFP for 1.3 million Christmas cards and envelopes to be completed in three months. The envelopes required were short runs and were to be personalized with return addresses in spot color. The firm owned two HP Indigos, but had no ability to run envelopes. Of all bidders, this printer was the only one bidding ‘digital printing’ of envelopes, while the others bid with litho presses. A major factor in the RFP award was the use of ‘environmentally friendly’ supplies provided by RISO. The organization bought two RISO RZ990s, two PS7R-5000s, and two print cylinders. A great application and a great solution for all. To learn more about RISO’s digital duplicators, visit http://us.riso.com.

Hi folks, I wanted to post information for users of the RISO MZ790 and RZ990. If you have a PS7R-9000 controller, you can scan files into your PC or Mac by following these simple steps. At 600 dpi, the scanners on these two models serve as excellent binary (monochrome) devices for inputting signatures, logos, clip art, and multi-page documents into your computer for placement in your documents. Here's how...

1. Place hardcopy document on duplicator’s glass platen or in ADF
2. From duplicator’s control panel, touch Mode button, then select Scanning

3. The file name and the ‘owner’ name can be customized by user
4. Press duplicator’s green Start button to scan image
5. Prompt offers to scan another image; when finished scanning, select the Exit icon from control panel and go to the PC connected to PS7R5000
6. Using PC’s Web browser, enter IP address of PS7R5000 to open RISO Monitor
7. Select Job Manager button and then select Scan and Storage tab; the recently scanned image file appears at the top of the list of files
8. Select the Download button to save the file to the computer’s hard drive (or you may delete, print, or view details of the file with the other buttons)
9. Drop-down menu appear with option to save as pdf, jpg, or tif; choose a file format
10. Click the Download button
11. Save the file to a drive on the computer; Open to view

RISO CS2000 color separation software let's you create spot color separations from common desktop software for multi-color printing on RISO's digital duplicators. It is compatible with MS Word, MS PowerPoint, MS Excel, MS Publisher, MS Paint, or any program with a ‘print to file’ feature. It is particularly useful for PDF documents and helpful for printing files with Pantone® colors to RISO's MZ790. The CS2000 program retails for $175, but is included at no charge with every RZ990, MZ790, and EZ590 unit sale. It is compatible with GDI drivers of these duplicator units.