What is a Fiery Controller

Forgive me - this is a stupid qeustion. But what exactly does a fiery controller do?

 

Fiery controller is a RIP: A central station to process your print jobs. Usually they are typically higher end workstations and we had good luck with them. We use with our many of our printers, but you need to check with your vendors for compatibility. It allows for color management, workflows, and more than what we probably use it for. If you're doing litho/offset printing dedicated RIPs can be a good addition

 

A raster image processor (RIP) is a hardware or combination hardware/software product that converts images described in the form of vector graphics statements into raster graphics images or bitmaps. For example, laser printers use RIPs to convert images that arrive in vector form (for example, text in a specified font ) into rasterized and therefore printable form.

RIPs are also used to enlarge images for printing. They use special algorithms (such as error diffusion and schochastic ) to provide large blow-ups without loss of clarity.