Contemplating moving from Apogee Prepress 5.0 to FujiFilm XMF.

[hospersc]

Hi all,

As the thread title indicates, we are looking at moving on from Apogee Prepress to either FujiFilm XMF or Rampage. This change has been prompted for two reasons. A) We are currently on Apogee 5.0 w/ Preps 5.2 and the upgrade to 7.0 is costly, around $40,000 with a yearly service contract at the cost of $10,000 per year. B) Automation ( e.g. Preflighting along with actually fixing the files, Imposition, more flexibility with directly input to the printing device). Being the IT Manager as well as working in a prepress environment for many years I always want more from my software. Apogee, to me, seems to be lacking.

We are a small commercial shop and our equipment includes:

AGFA Avalon N4 CTP
Epson Stylus Pro 7880

Offset:
Heidelberg SM 74 20"x29" 5-Color with coater
Shinohara 52 4-Color Press
3 - Multilith 1650s

Digital and Wide Format:
Indigo 7500 6 Color Digital Press
Océ VP 6250 Duplex Printer
Roland Soljet 540 Sign Printer
2 - XEROX 4110
XEROX Docutech 6180

If I have failed to provide any key information, let me know as I would like to provide a clear picture of our capabilities.

Has anyone here moved from Apogee to XMF? If so, could you share your opinions?

Thank you in advance,
Chris Hospers

[frailer]

Can only suggest you cruise over the threads in XMF, here, Chris; get some sort of feel for what's in it. If you go for the level with integrated imposition, that is a huge plus in its favour, IMO.
We are about to move to v4 in a couple of days. There are certainly a lot of good features in it, once you've wrapped around the GUI. I've never used Apogee, so can't comment there. I do know that I miss PREPS and Dynastrip not one little bit.
How much you want to/can automate preflight will need some looking into. We tend to preflight manually here, as we're relatively low throughput. I know a number of others, (on other systems), do this as well. PitStop can be integrated into XMF, but we haven't.

[m2r]

We are a cut-n-dry pleasing colors shop and recently changed from a Harlequin Rip with Pyramid Imposition and BasysPrint Platesetter to XMF and Dart Platesetter, and have mixed feelings.
I find the GUI inefficient, labor intensive.
The Imposition does have the pieces that we were missing in Pyramid, which were little.
Our biggest problem is that we thought we were getting a turn-key program, and it is not - lots of little switched and thingies to play with.

What do you think that XMF is going to provide that you do not already have?

[frailer]

Are you using as many Presets as you can m2r? Things like Management Info area>Presets.... Just a thought. I guess the trade off for 'tweakability' is control over output, ultimately.
Also, if you're using Templates and/or Stripping Sheet Templates; a lot of time saved there. Am wondering if the 'switched thingys to play with' could be eliminated this way.   :undecided:   Took me a while to get used to that stuff, but it flies now.

[m2r]

Even in a single "workflow" I found just too many options to get going, our training was poor at best, more focused on layout vs. getting jobs to RIP correctly.
We went through month$$$$$ of bad plates / print, to find that some font embedding option was not selected.
I don't know if it's all companies, but you would think that they would have a solid working setup when installing and build from there.
A good 25% of our problems was not understand exactly what we were getting, vs. what we were "sold".