Odystar users?

[kermit]

Which version? Do you like your workflow? What's good/bad? How does it compare to Rampage or Apogee?

[EmptyWords]

I just upgraded us to 3.0.4 just this past Monday, we were running 2.6.4 for a long time, with really no problems, love the 3 stage vector trapper. Don't really have anything bad to say about it, as far as good, I love the fact that I can build some very custom/customer driven workflows and only have to do it once and forget about it, also I like the ability it gives me for everything from sending proofs via e-mail, ftp or web.

We don't use the rip in Odystar nor do we pre-flatten in Odystar, we have Ody hand off the live unflattened pdf files to our Nexus rip, when we looked a getting Ody there were some issues with spot color jobs taking excessive amounts of rip time, so we just stuck with Nexus as our back end. My understanding is they have since resolved the ripping problem.

As far as comparing with other workflows, when I did research before we got Ody, I really liked Rampage, Prinergy, Trueflow and several others too, the one I didn't like at all was Apogee, we have had several versions of Apogee in the past and I never did like it, not once. We have had so many problems with each version and very poor support, the road techs I worked with from Agfa were good, but tech support always treated us like second class citizens and that they were doing us a favor, in spite of the huge service contracts we had with them.

I don't want this to sound as a pure rant about them, I did love the old imagesetters we had in the past, but the software always seemed to be behind the curve. They sold us several of their output devices and then of course dropped support and handed it off to another company, to me when you sell a product you should back it up.

EW

[Joe]

We tried Odystar back in version 2.6 and it seemed to work pretty well. It uses Pitstop for preflighting. Trapping seemed to work well. There were some problems with some of the prepress tools which I understand have been fixed by now. It is a good design, very flexible, completely based on XML. We never had the Odystar screening RIP so we had to send our imposed flats back into Nexus for screening and output to CTP. The deal breaker for us was that we need Web Growth Compensation for ouor web presses and it was not working correctly. They did get it working but it was agonizingly slow at the time. They've since moved it into their PDF RIP on the Nexus side. Not sure about the Odystar screening RIP though. It has imposing gateways that allow you to use either Preps or DynaStrip. They push DynaStrip pretty hard and it does have more features and options and seems to work better than the Preps gateway but we already were using Preps so we stayed with that and it worked but not ideally. I can't say if it's any better now since we don't have it anymore (due to the WGC issue stated above). I really wished we could have stuck with it longer but we were doing more testing than production and we finally had to pull the plug on it. I know there are people using it and love it.

I can't really compare it to other workflows like Rampage and Apogee as I've never used them. I can say it's a lot cheaper than Apogee though. Esko has raised the prices of everything since the buyout so I'm sure the price we paid is irrelevant now.

Edit: Merged the duplicate topics together.

[PrepressN00b]

we are running 2 odystar boxes. both are full 3.0.5 with Odystar Rips. I love it. Odystar combined with Neo in my mind is the most flexable and automated system out there.