I'm shopping around for a new prepress workflow and am hoping to get some opinions. I'm looking at Apogee and Prinergy right now. I've had over 10 years experience with Prinergy before and always thought it was solid. No experience with Apogee.
If money weren't a big factor, what would you prefer to work with?
Also looking for proofing suggestions. 

We're a medium size commercial printer running web and sheetfed presses. No plans for digital. No MIS integration.Workflow currently is AE & Nexus combo. Proofing through KPS to a couple Epson 9900's and an Impoproofer. Plating to a Screen VLF platesetter.

Thanks

Money is no object go Prinergy.

Want to save a load of cash over Prinergy or Apogee. Get XMF.

Prinergy is my first choice but Apogee seemed better than expected from the Webex. Not sure how it is in the real world and if it could handle our web layouts.
Is Colorflow still pretty meh? I have only used Harmony curves when I worked with Prinergy. And I haven't head great things about it for proofing either so I guess I'll have to look into GMG or something.

I know people are using Colorflow. We are still using Harmony though for our plate curves. We don't do hard proofs of any kind here.

Quote from: SpicyVindaloo on September 02, 2016, 02:03:42 PMI'm shopping around for a new prepress workflow and am hoping to get some opinions. I'm looking at Apogee and Prinergy right now. I've had over 10 years experience with Prinergy before and always thought it was solid. No experience with Apogee.
If money weren't a big factor, what would you prefer to work with?
Also looking for proofing suggestions.

We're a medium size commercial printer running web and sheetfed presses. No plans for digital. No MIS integration.Workflow currently is AE & Nexus combo. Proofing through KPS to a couple Epson 9900's and an Impoproofer. Plating to a Screen VLF platesetter.

Thanks

I'm currently running Fuji XMF, XMF Remote & Colorpath Sync for our operations. We are a Medium to Large Company and impose jobs/proofs out to multiple CTP/proofers across 3 States running multiple sheetfed presses etc. Colour path Sync keeps proofs and presses all within specs etc across the company. We use a Gateway RIP / TIF catcher so we didn't need to replace CTPs. I can only speak from our configuration, but it works really good. Pretty much bullet proof. I believe we get a great end result without being screwed over on costs.  Sorry I can't be of help for anything web. Maybe worth having a look/demo at XMF.

We're on XMF here, fallen behind on the leap to 64 bit server (don't start me on that whinge again), and am as happy as Diddler is. Bear in mind we're smaller, mostly in house, and run on narrower gauge than his mob are, so to speak. The impo is amazing. In the Dark Era I trained myself online for the old Dynastrip on Fujifilm's Celebra. Prior to that on PREPS in the PostScript environment.
XMF's fully integrated impo is really good.

I know Joe had an issue when he tested XMF; to do with multi-web integration, from memory. He might want to flag that for you.

Was going to throw this on forum this morning.. may as well be here. Damn I love the 'Creep Face Only' feature in XMF impo. Once you've set everything in place, (a learning curve, like anything), the results are easy, and transferable from job to job.
Screenshot shows my quick check, on the centre section, to make sure it's 'morphing' the pages in progressively.

A couple of screenshots to give you a look at the UI.

Thanks,
I looked at XMF a while back while with a different employer and wasn't impressed with the web and multi-web integration. Not sure how much it's changed in two years but that's still a concern where I'm at now.
Surprisingly, Apogee is coming out the most expensive option for a whole system. Apogee's service contract is only slightly less per month than Prinergy. And Esko, while being the cheapest option (since it would just be an upgrade/training) has the highest service contract, almost double Agfa and Kodak's.

Apogee is a solid workflow, but when I used it a few years ago it seemed like it was best suited when jobs had to go according to a prebuilt plan or flow. My Apogee trainer came in and helped me to build workflows based on what was most common in my shop, but when things had to be customized on the fly it was more challenging. By contrast, when I went to Prinergy training, they first taught us how Prinergy worked and what it could do,  and once we had a good feel for what was possible, then they helped us build out our processes.

I worked for only a year with Prinergy before changing to Apogee (job change), and I found myself constantly comparing the 2 systems and in my mind Prinergy always seemed better. However, the guy who replaced me at the Prinergy job came from an Apogee shop and he thought Apogee was better, even after using Prinergy for a while. Maybe it's a mindset thing.

The shop I'm at now uses Prinergy and I know we'd have a tough time if we had to use Apogee, but mainly because Prinergy seems to be more flexible on the fly.

I've also used Nexus (9, I think - whatever was the last one before Automation Engine). I'd choose Prinergy over that, too.

I used Nexus up through version 8. I think Nexus was behind the PDF/transparency phase and it suffered because of it. We switched to Prinergy which was light years ahead of Nexus at the time when it came to dealing with complex PDF's plus Nexus at the time still hadn't figured out how to do web growth compensation for web presses. I think Nexus has caught up in regards to the whole PDF/transparency stuff but it was never as user friendly as what Prinergy is.

A couple of years ago we decided to switch from Prinergy to XMF due to the costs of Prinergy. The biggest issue we had was trying to do multi-section press runs in the impo portion of XMF. Not multi web mind you but multi-section templates. During training the trainers had no idea how to make that work and we quickly learned that XMF, while it does everything as advertised, it is not as user friendly as Prinergy plus their online proofing, XMF Remote, was way behind Kodak Insite so we decided to stay with Prinergy. Personally if it was my money being spent I would go with XMF but it's not and I really like Prinergy so I'm good with still having it.

That helps quite a bit. We do a lot of multi-section impositions here. So it sounds like XMF isn't really going to fit us. 

We have a lot of problems with AE/Nexus and PDF/Transparencies. So we still have to rasterize pages to get them to plate. Two years ago, right before I came on board, they had Esko come in to get Imaging Engine to output our plates instead of Nexus. My understanding is they couldn't get it to output more than a plate or two an hour so we never switched from using Nexus.  A week ago, I found out  we've been paying mucho $$$ for Imaging Engine support the last two years. 

We have had great sucess with a Xitron workflow, the rip name is Navigator.

We used to have Apogee, but the cost for a small shop became overwhelming.

I find that we are doing few workarounds these days, this rip will eventually spit out good platess on the ctp, very good with flattened pdfs, or if necessary, transparent..... but cant remember the last time we had to rip and trap a page in Photosop to get  a job out.

Check em out, they are very nice and helpful people as well.

http://www.xitron.com

I'm running the latest and greatest Xitron Sierra workflow. Just upgraded last month.

The multi-web stuff was nonexistent, until version 4... the newest version 6.x is good. I'm doing multi-web impos for a 22 station Merc... pulling upwards of 5 webs, usually down around 3 or 4, but the multiweb stuff is solid now. I have even mixed 3/4 webs and double parallel into multi web impositions, all native in Sierra. I used to be a die-hard Preps junkie but I gotta say, the native Sierra imposition is super slick... I like it better than Preps, now.

I love the new version and the guys at Xitron are great. I'm busting out over 100, 8-up plates per day... 100 line news, up to 175 line magazine and sheetfed too. All by me onesy. My Prinergy buddies, locally, aren't nearly as fast as us Xitron guys.   

Sierra (which is the new big brother of Navigator), was a spinoff of XMF, but Xitron has it as their own licensed product now, and has really focused on the multi-web areas more than Fuji, who seems to be all-in on sheetfed.

Interesting, ear. That's a US licensing thing that's completely off our radar here, (we're such minnows, on the scale of things).

The hair stands up on my neck reading about 'multi-section'.. 'multi-web'.     Just a slow old sheet guy...   But like... old..