Software

Tech8 has announced that the Wasatch SoftRIP HP Exclusive Edition now includes support for the HP DesignJet L25500 latex printer free of charge.  This latest edition of SoftRIP is fully-certified for the L25500 printer under HP’s RIP Certification programme.  Certification is only awarded to products that have undergone rigorous testing by HP and met the necessary performance requirements.

The fully-featured SoftRIP solution also includes support for older HP printers at no extra cost.  Other features include RIP-while-print, Cost Estimator, the Wasatch Tracer, unmatched image quality (with 16-bit rendering) and much more.

One happy customer is US-based Global Imaging.  According to Josh Marten, West Coast Territory Manager, “Our installs Wasatch have been with HP DesignJet L25500 printers in multiple Alphagraphics sites throughout the country and with Agfa Anapurna printers that we've placed in several independent shops.  Wasatch SoftRIP is extremely easy to use and is designed to cater to all markets - from entry level to the more experienced.”

Tech8, the technical support and spares provider for the wide format printing industry, is authorised to supply and support Wasatch SoftRIP products globally.  Justin Atkinson, Business Development Manager at Tech8, comments, “The new Wasatch version with inclusive support for HP latex printers offers users a powerful and cost-effective way to drive up to four HP DesignJet printers with a single RIP.” 

Wasatch SoftRIP HP Exclusive Edition is available immediately from Tech8 at a cost of £1100.  Please visit www.tech8ripsoftware.com for more information.

Pantone and EFI Announce Fiery Now Natively Supports PANTONE PLUS

Pantone LLC, an X-Rite company and EFI today announced Fiery digital print servers and solutions support for PANTONE PLUS. A long-time Pantone partner, EFI was the first vendor to implement PANTONE Calibration for digital colour devices and has now expanded its built-in colour libraries to include PANTONE PLUS Colours, available to current Fiery users.

Over the years, Pantone and EFI have worked closely to continually provide designers and print professionals with the best colour tools and workflows for accurate digital colour printing. Fiery technology, together with PANTONE PLUS, provides the best colour reproduction possible from every output device - ensuring that spot colours are accurate and dependable. Fiery servers come preloaded with PANTONE Colour Libraries, including all colours found in the PANTONE PLUS SERIES, to achieve optimal output whenever a document is printed.

"Eliminating guesswork and costs associated with reworking printing projects is  a key component to running a successful printing business," said Andy Hatkoff, vice president of technology licensing for Pantone. "By incorporating PANTONE PLUS on Fiery servers, customers are guaranteed to get spot colours that are accurate and consistent for all jobs."

"The Fiery implementation of PANTONE PLUS streamlines colour workflows for million of Fiery users worldwide," said John Henze, vice president of marketing for EFI Fiery. "Fiery users get the right spot colour the first time without the need to manually determine tint values for matching colours in the industry standard Pantone libraries."

With Fiery Spot-On(TM) for Fiery servers, users can match colour accurately and  modify corresponding CMYK values to produce desired "in gamut" colours. Spot-On also allows users to print entire spot colour libraries, including PANTONE Colour Libraries, which are delivered as industry-standard named colour ICC profiles, to ensure users know exactly how PANTONE Colours will be reproduced. PANTONE Colour Libraries are used with Fiery output profiles to automatically colour manage each PANTONE PLUS Colour into the gamut of the Fiery driven output device.

Pricing and Availability

PANTONE PLUS SERIES Products can be purchased from the Pantone website at www.pantone.comor from PANTONE resellers worldwide. Every PLUS SERIES purchase includes COLOR MANAGER Software free of charge upon registration.

PANTONE PLUS SERIES is also available now from EFI's website at http://w3.efi.com/resources/educational-downloads/fiery-pantone-library-download

PANTONE PLUS SERIES

A modern evolution of the PANTONE MATCHING SYSTEM®, the PANTONE PLUS SERIES offers designers and printers new features and capabilities to fulfill their creative desires. Enhancements include the chromatic arrangement of colours for more intuitive selection, an expanded palette of spot colours, the addition of new premium metallics and a broader range of neons. For more information on the PANTONE PLUS SERIES, go to http://bit.ly/96DUzo

GMG has announced that the GMG ColorProof contone and GMG DotProof/FlexoProof halftone proofing solutions now fully support the Mimaki UJF-706 inkjet printers to enable the production of top-quality contract-level packaging proofs, prototypes and short-run production.

Core proofing applications of the GMG/Mimaki solution include:

• mock-up/prototype creation on a vast array of substrates ranging from 0.02 mm up to 150 mm, including cardboard, corrugated, plastic, metallic and synthetic papers, foils, OPP, PE and PET film, even leather and fabrics
• personalised packaging and short runs
• creation of prototype labels

The Mimaki UJF-706 inkjet printer series features extremely resistant inks as well as varnish for special effects and simulating embossing on a wide range of substrates. Its print media versatility is unique.  In combination with GMG colour management, this solution opens design agencies, repro and print houses as well as brand owners in the packaging and label markets to completely new dimensions for packaging proofing applications.

The colour management technology implemented in GMG ColorProof/DotProof/FlexoProof ensures maximum production reliability and opens up numerous opportunities to save costs compared to traditional proofing systems for the packaging and label markets, such as the DuPont Cromalin analogue proofing solution and Kodak Approval.

 

Markzware, the leading developer of file conversion technology for Adobe InDesign, today announced an upgrade to its popular Adobe Plugin, Q2ID (Quark to InDesign). This latest version of the Adobe plugin runs under InDesign CS5.5 to convert Quark up through QuarkXPress 9 files. Q2ID is also available with Quark 9 support for InDesign CS4 and InDesign CS5.5 and is available on both the Mac and Windows platforms.
 
Markzware Q2ID InDesign plugin converts Quark documents and instantly recreates them to an InDesign CS4, CS5 and now CS5.5. It is often a daunting task to manually convert Quark files. Today, Q2ID v5.5 provides a quick, easy and affordable method to convert content from Quark to InDesign. This Quark conversion is as easy as opening up any Quark document into a new InDesign document. Q2ID is very accurate, providing special attention to the intricate details of the Quark content when converting Quark to InDesign.

Shelley White of Running With Scissors Graphic Design explains how she benefited from this Adobe plugin for Quark to InDesign, “I have been working in Adobe InDesign for a couple of years, so when faced with revising two catalogues created in QuarkXPress, I knew I had to find a way to painlessly convert them to InDesign.”
 
White continues, “After a bit of research, I found the Markzware Q2ID software. Reviews were solid and the price was reasonable, so I purchased the software and took it to task. I was thrilled and amazed at the results. Sure, there were a few little oddball remnants left after the translation, but there was very, very little cleanup work involved. It would have taken me untold hours of my own manual work to do what Q2ID did in a flash.”
 
The software upgrade of the Q2ID v5.5 for Quark conversion is available immediately at the Q2ID Store.  

As it marks the 20-year anniversary of the first Fiery digital print server, EFI today launched the next-generation Fieryplatform. Fiery technology is long recognised in the industry for its blazing speed, colour accuracy, image quality, and intuitive user-interface, and with this launch increases operator productivity, produces more accurate and consistent colour, and provides stronger variable data capabilities for personalised communications.

Named Fiery System 10, the new platform delivers documents faster than ever before, along with the latest system calibration technology to guarantee colour consistency at all times, tighter integration with the printer's finishing options, and greater flexibility and control.

Toby Weiss, general manager of the Fiery business unit and senior vice president of EFI, said: "EFI has been a pioneer in digital print technology for the past two decades, and continues to lead the technology advancement of digital front-end controllers with today's platform launch. System 10 is the fastest, most robust ever, and is poised to bring amazing results to demanding customers worldwide. Fiery technology is now the most integrated platform in the industry, with connectivity to business process automation solutions, production workflow systems, and direct mobile printing to deliver a complete solution from creation to print."

"EFI's Fiery System 10 release provides a wide collection of powerful and user-friendly tools for print workflow," said Jim Hamilton, group director of production hardware at InfoTrends. "System 10 is a demonstration of EFI's continued leadership position in front-end systems for production digital print."

Fiery System 10 provides advanced capabilities to customers in four key areas: colour, usability, performance and integration.

Colour - Calibration Features and Powerful Visual Editor
A major enhancement to Fiery's colour management system is the new Fiery Calibrator that makes the calibration process more effective, integrated, and easier to use. The new Job-based Calibration increases calibration accuracy and effectiveness because calibration is customised for a specific job and the associated media and profiles. Because calibration is critical and needs to be performed routinely, Fiery System 10 has incorporated a "Calibration Guard" to provide calibration status, warnings, and alerts to encourage calibration to take place and ensure colour quality.

The Fiery Image Enhance Visual Editor (IEVE) is a powerful feature newly available on the Command WorkStation® print job management and user interface software that ships with Fiery System 10. IEVE allows editing each image in a job without going back to the native design file, saving time and reducing costs. IEVE simplifies the editing process, providing an interactive toolset for optimising image appearance and applying automatic per-image corrections, to ensure photos look their best. This tool also gives users a manual control to individually adjust brightness, contrast, highlights, shadows, colour balance, sharpness and to make red-eye corrections on any image within a job. (To see a video of this powerful new capability, visit http://w3.efi.com/fiery/Products/CWS5 /Demos)

Usability - Command WorkStation and Mixed Finishing Sets Simplify Complex Jobs
The latest version of Command WorkStation software is now even easier to use. Common tasks are more accessible and required job information more readily available to operators to increase productivity.

In addition, a Mixed Finishing Sets feature in the SeeQuence Compose option is now available to simplify complex jobs in high-production environments. With the new Fiery Mixed Finishing Sets (and an inline finisher attached to the print engine), users can specify multiple finishing requirements among the various subsets within a single job to produce completely finished jobs, minimising labour.

Performance - Support of New VDP Standard
EFI has a long-standing commitment to supporting industry standards, and Fiery System 10 has a number of enhanced Variable Data Print (VDP) features. Most notably, it supports PDF/VT-1, a new standard developed by ISO (International Organisation for Standardisation) for VDP data exchange.PDF/VT-1 brings the benefits of a PDF workflow to VDP, helping customers increase production efficiency with capabilities such as late stage exchange of critical variable content.By folding seamlessly into existing PDF-based prepress operations, PDF/VT-1 enables a single, common PDF print production workflow for all job types.

Integration - Direct Wi-Fi Printing for Today's Mobile Workforce; MIS and Workflow Connectivity
An ideal solution for corporate CRDs and offices with Fiery-driven MFPs, System 10 has built-in technology that enables direct mobile printing from Apple iOS devices to the Fiery-driven printer. Wi-Fi enabled Apple iOS devices (such as iPhones and iPads) will automatically discover any System 10 Fiery-driven printer on the same network inside the corporate firewall. Employees can simply select a listed printer and touch "print" with no need to download an app or install printer drivers.

"EFI's embedded support for mobile printing from iOS devices is another example of how mobile printing is moving from a 'billable service' to a standard feature for applications behind the firewall," said Robert Palmer, director, Managed Document Practice at Lyra Research.

Besides integration with mobile devices, Fiery servers are a great fit with EFI's market-leading portfolio of print MIS and workflow solutions, including PrintSmith™, Pace™, Radius and Monarch management systems and the EFI Digital StoreFront® web-to-print platform.

Fiery System 10 further expands its industry integration capability with Agfa Apogee Prepress Workflow, and the upcoming release of Kodak Prinergy Workflow, to enable prepress workflow users to submit jobs to and manage one or more Fiery-controlled digital print engines right from the same familiar user interface.These prepress workflow integrations create a single workflow to serve blended production, reducing operational costs and boosting production performance.

Fiery System 10 is available now. The first OEM printer brands that use Fiery System 10 will be announced soon. For more information, visit www.efi.com

X-Rite and its wholly owned subsidiary Pantone have announced a US$150 cash back promotion for X-Rite customers who want to upgrade their i1Match, ProfileMaker or MonacoPROFILER software to i1Publish which contains the next generation i1Profiler colour management software.  i1Profiler delivers an entirely new, flexible user defined experience to generate the highest quality ICC profiles for unrivaled colour accuracy.

Fully supporting the new Mac OS X 10.7 Lion operating system, the latest version of i1Publish is a fully-featured ICC profiling solution that includes i1Profiler software, ColorChecker Camera Calibration software, PANTONE Color Manager software and two ColorChecker targets – ColorChecker Classic and ColorChecker Proof. i1Publish quickly and easily creates custom profiles for cameras, monitors, digital projectors, and RGB, CMYK and CMYK+4 printers, ensuring colour accuracy from capture to output. It also features new assurance validation and verification functions using digital standards. 

Users of i1Match, ProfileMaker and MonacoPROFILER users will see improved colour quality thanks to a new engine that creates highly accurate profiles for the truest colour all the way from capture to output. A new user interface features both basic and advanced modes to give users the flexibility they need. It's easily customised and enables users to save and share workflows or workflow components.

The following enhancements are included in the upgrade:

• Improved colour quality - new color engine creates highly accurate profiles for the truest colour from capture to output
• New user interface – basic and advanced modes provide the ultimate flexibility; easily customise, save and share workflows or workflow components
• Accurately capture colours every time with included ColorChecker Camera Calibration software and target
• Accurately view colours every time on your monitors and projectors
• Accurately print colours every time on RGB, CMYK and CMYK+ printers
• New Quality Assurance Tools
• Fully compatible with Mac OS X 10.7 Lion operating system

Through Sept. 30, 2011, X-Rite is offering customers a US$150 cash back rebate on the upgrade for US and Canadian customers who have i1XTreme, i1Proof, i1XT, i1Pro OEM, i1Photo Pro, i1Photo LT, i1Photo, i1Photo SG, i1Design LT, i1Basic, i1 Basic Pro, ProfileMaker 5, MonacoPROFILER 4.

For more information about the i1Publish upgrade and rebate, please visit www.xrite.com or www.xritephoto.com.