My brother, the artist, asked me, the electrical engineer, what RIP is. He was looking at large format printers on Epson's web site and said they recommend thi s thing, but no where on their web site do they define it. I took a look myself , and found references to it, but never a definition. It's apparently some item of software that runs as some sort of printer driver o r server. Can somebody explain it to a simpleton such as me?