Prepress
HP and Nikon Empower New Professional Solutions
Thursday 25. September 2008 - After several years of close technical collaboration, HP and Nikon today announced an agreement to collaborate on products and technologies to enable end-to-end digital fine art solutions for professional photographers.
The collaboration will focus on delivering technology and solutions that truly simplify and optimize the digital fine art workflow, allowing photographers to greatly increase their productivity, extend their creative expression and grow their businesses.
The end-to-end solutions will be based on high-quality advanced cameras and lenses from Nikon, state-of-the-art, large-format HP Designjet photo printers and HP Artist Software technology. HP Artist Software uses select, predefined camera and lighting configurations, automatically corrects the non-uniformities in lighting conditions and emulates colors optimized for printing on select HP Designjet Photo Printers, potentially reducing total production time from hours to minutes.
The leading technologies and engineering capabilities of HP and Nikon, along with their close collaboration over the past three years has enabled HP and Nikon to create unprecedented match between the image capture and the fine art print, and is resulting in an unparalleled optimized capture-to-print workflow solution for professional photographers.
“By joining forces with Nikon, we can leverage our respective leading technology capabilities to deliver unrivalled solutions to our customers,” said Santi Morera, vice president and general manager, Large Format Printing Business, Imaging and Printing Group, HP. “With the new solution, HP and Nikon can address the needs of professional photographers for a seamless and integrated solution from beginning to end, empowering creative professionals to take full advantage of exciting opportunities and new applications in digital fine arts.”
“It is an epochal event that Nikon and HP, two imaging companies with highly advanced digital imaging technologies in their respective fields, are joining hands to offer a powerful, unique end-to-end solution for digital fine arts,” said Makoto Kimura, president, Imaging Company, Nikon Corporation. “We expect this collaboration will contribute to the growth and expansion of the digital fine arts field.”
The first solution to be introduced through this collaboration is a simplified digital fine art reproduction system consisting of the Nikon D3 camera, the new HP Designjet Z3200 Photo Printer and a special edition of ErgoSoft StudioPrint photo RIP software powered by HP Artist Software technology. Through this solution, customers can easily and quickly create professional-class digital fine art reproductions without requiring any advanced color management or editing techniques.
“This is a well-designed, integrated solution that solves a number of challenges in digital fine art reproduction,” said David Saffir, fine art photographer and author of Mastering Digital Color. “The components – from capture to processing to printing – are completely integrated and work together in a way that is unmatched in this field. The final printed reproduction is remarkable in its fidelity to the original – in color, density and detail.”
The solution will be demonstrated for the first time in the HP booth in Hall 4.1 at Photokina 2008.