Who has Prinect?

[David]

Okay, looking for any and all Prinect users.
What do you have and are you happy, not happy, need more, need less?
How do you like the imposition?
Does the trapping work like you hoped?


looking to make an evaluation to report to upstairs and need a little input.

thanks in advance for your help,
David

[zox]

We have it and I love it.
It has it's quirks like any other software, but once you know what they are and what are the workarounds, workflow rocks.
Trapping works awesome 99% of the time, occasionally it has hiccup or two which you can remedy easily if you know what you are doing.
We are using Signa Station for imposition and it is a lot to digest, but extremely powerful.
In good hands, you can do miracles.
We have dedicated planners who use only Signa and they like it, but I don't think it's utilized to it's full potential.
We have to get more training.
I hope this helps.

[determined]

I had it at the old place (haven't used it for a few years now) but I was on the front lines (training, first to use, then training others)....from what I can remember, it was ALOT to figure out at first (you can do alot with the imposition, but it's hell finding where they hide it all)...You had to buy trapping software for Acrobat (I believe it ran with pitstop, don't quite remember)...but our place was cheap, so they only bought 1 user license and somebody was always using it when you needed it. The trapping was weird (didn't handle spot color spreadbacks on cheaters well and to fix it was a whole other thing to figure out....you had to play with color densities to get it to work correctly....again, in Acrobat). All in all, not a bad system but alot to figure out...

OH yeah, (it's all coming back to me now) they have another acrobat tool for varnishes that rocks!!

[Helmet_of_Poe]

In 2007, we upgraded from an entry-level Heidelberg workflow and a Heidelberg Prosetter 74 (violet plates) to Prinect Printready L (now called Prepress Manager) and a fully automated Suprasetter with thermal plates. We were already an all-Heidelberg shop, but I still seriously considered workflows from Kodak/Creo, Screen, Fuji and another one I don't remember. Some were piecemealed together while others were complete and viable packages -- for us, Printready made the most sense. (Kodak had one incredible Acrobat plug-in that will compare and merge PDFs so version changes are easy to spot, but that one feature was not enough to sway us. Hopefully, Heidelberg will introduce something similar in the future.)

Printready offers all of the automation that you'd need for a modern workflow, but you don't have to make things complicated if you don't want to. For me, the flow of the system seems logical, so getting up to speed was not difficult. I know some operators from other shops that came up to speed quickly, too. I have not seen an imposition package that compares to Prinect Signastation for production power, and while it may seem overwhelming at first, you'll soon come to trust it. (If you run a larger shop of 8 or more operators, get at least 2 licenses AND floaters for Signa. The price is steep, but it's worth it. Heck, maybe if you pout a little you'll get a deal.) Get the Sheet Optimizer option if you do any gang-impositions, it's the best out there. The trapping plug-in for Acrobat is still part of the system, and they use the same engine in the automated portions of the workflow so you can set different rules for different circumstances. Traps can be edited manually with the plug-in should you need to. I agree with determined, the Varnish plug-in is just magic!

Hope this helps...