Just taking a moment to say thanks to the Accurip folks for assistance with an issue we had.
We run Accurip, have for many years and yes we were forced as others were to upgrade to the black pearl version in order to run on osx Yosemite. I didn't like that at first, don't care much about the $150 but the whole thing came across as b.s. on my end since we had no issue running our current version on Yosemite prior. That said, it's worth getting over the little sting of that and continuing to use the RIP in my opinion.
I have been chasing an issue with inconsistent film length output from our T3270 for days, to the tune of many yards of film and eroding sanity. Charlie from AR jumped in to assist. His T3270 outputted the file I was using for testing correctly, mine didn't. After careful comparison of settings, we found it was a paper type setting I was unaware of existing.
I know a lot of folks were miffed about the upgrade thing with AR but I have to say that Charlie's support is worth every penny of that cost, he helped me troubleshoot an issue that was 100% printer related and had nothing to do with his RIP. That's service right there.
We did try to move to FM rather than pony up for what I felt was a needless "upgrade". And, for sure, FM had slightly better screening for the lower res/higher speed settings and deeper adjustments for droplet/density at 2880x resolutions but honestly it didn't do anything beyond that that AR cannot in terms of the final output quality. Linearization does play into this however since you need deep control over droplet/density to linearize at high resolution and is the only reason we would switch from AR to another rip. Unlike a lot of shops, all our films are outputted at 2880x res. We like clean dots and AR delivers them at this res but linearizing at that resolution is not quite doable at percentages over 96% due to lack of droplet control. Linearization in AR should be no problem at the lower resolutions given the droplet control available there.
On top of this, AR reigns supreme for ease of use in a mac workflow and the new interface is very nice to boot. FM's failure to print from mac to pc without major file errors is why we had to give up on it, not for lack of tech support from CADlink mind you, they were excellent, but their print to PC setup just doesn't work unfortunately. To be fair, I hear they are working on fixing it.
Just a couple pennies on the matter. I'll stand by AR as the smoothest RIP for anyone printing from an osx environment.
