GIA REPORT (Graphic Intelligence Agency) by Marlon Castillo
Who is GIA?
GIA is a company in charge of training people for HP equipment, especially design equipment (printers, scanners, etc.). Although GIA is not an HP company directly, they are joined, this enables all customers that acquire HP equipment to have an appropriate training for using it. Regularly all these training take place in HP locations, in order to support GIA and guarantee the quality of training.
Comments
On October 18, 2001, I personally had the opportunity to attend a GIA event, in Los Angeles California. I will talk about this training in the following report so that everyone can meet the quality and the level of GIA training.
As I said, GIA is a company who trains people in HP area, especially in HP equipment, the seminar I attended was basically focused on two HP DesignJet large format printers: The HP DesignJet 5000ps and HP DesignJet 2500cp both using UV inks, which have a color lasting guarantee of 150 years.
Tom Tremble Instructor
An acknowledged and experienced person in handling HP equipment, it is very important that a person who knows about handling HP equipment also has been experienced in it, and Mr. Tremble has these two skills.
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About the Seminar
Although the seminar lasted one day only we cover all the important topics for this subject.
The seminar was basically focused on the HP DesignJet 5000PS and HP DesignJet 2500CP, they talked about technical specifications of each, when we refer to technical specifications we are talking about Ram memory, rip, communication ports, media and ink type that they use. Both large format printers work with UV and Dye inks.
I am sure that these topics were very interesting for those people who are beginning in handling this equipment as they were for the experts or the people who are more familiarized with it, because there are always important details that can save us a lot of money.
Talking about the basic knowledge of the performance of these large format printers, we begin with topics such as, file formats and page setups in the programs, and so on.
Every person who uses a large format printer has to be familiarized with the existing format types (tiff, jpeg, eps, pdf, psd, and so on). We talked about this formats, its advantages and applications.
After all these important topics we were familiarized with these two large format printers and their capacities of printing, then we started practicing all the knowledge we were acquiring. We were practicing with the HP DesignJet 5000PS and HP DisignJet 2500.
While we were practicing we learned how to setup the page, possibly simple things but very important for example: what type of print Best, Speed or normal, theses aspects are very important because each one has its application depending of the job we want to do. We also learned about all software configurations in order to have satisfactory results in our prints.
There are always terms that we know but we do not know their definition and that was what we learned in this seminar. Terms like postscript, Fonts, Fonts management and others. All these terms are very important to have excellent prints.
But knowing and applying all those concepts would not be useful if we do not know anything about color management; all the people who work in color separation and printing field should know all the basic skills about color, resolution and screen ruling line art. These three terms are not only involved when printing, they are also related in the process of digital imaging that begins with scanning and ends with the final product, the print. There are many formulas to determine at what resolution I should scanned the image depending on the distance and the size that it will be seen.
Finally they talked about Software Rip, which helps us in printing, the types of Software Rip and they gave us a few suggestions of we were willing to buy. I personally have experienced software Rip and it certainly makes the job more efficient.
Comments
In general I could say that this event lasted one day only, but as I said at the beginning, it was full of great knowledge, we covered the topics I already mentioned and solved a lot of doubts I had.
This type of seminars is very useful to any technical level that works under digital imaging. I hope this information can encourage people from Latin America to attend this kind of events because the information and training that GIA provides is certainly very useful and the cost is affordable.
I hope to keep attending these seminars to maintain you informed.
First posted Apr. 24, 2002.
