Whether you buy from Canon or Xerox (or Epson or Konica Minolta, etc.), if you are buying a printer for heavy-duty use in a Mac design studio then it will probably have a Fiery RIP[^1] manufactured by [Electronics For Imaging][efi].

There are lots of things to hate about Fiery RIPs.

But right now I am going to hate their backward attitude to Mac driver installation. It is the year 2009 and this lot have yet to supply drivers as anything other than [Installer Vise][vise] applications. So that means no simple command-line roll-outs with [Apple Remote Desktop][ard]. That means no way of looking at the installation manifest ahead of installation. No way of having any confidence that the installer won’t screw everything up.

To compound their sins, EFI like to give their installer applications a very pretty icon that looks just like a stylized Apple installer package. It is a very pretty icon of a box; a box full of hate.

Purple box of Installer Vise hate

[efi]: http://www.efi.com/
[vise]: http://www.mindvision.com/macvise.asp
[ard]: http://www.apple.com/remotedesktop/

[^1]: RIP stands for Raster Image Processor. Which leads to quite enjoyable conversations about ripping through pages.