Adobe PDF Print Engine vs. Adobe CPSI

[yespress]

I would like to get some feed back as to what rip people are using for Prinergy and why: Adobe PDF Print Engine or Adobe CPSI. Any recommendations?

[pmhapp]

APPE since it was supported.
I'd be interested to know why anyone would use CPSI anymore.

[dpierce@packgraph.com]

APPE. If it were not for this, I would have recommended against the Prinergy purchase in favor of the existing Brisque system ie: we already had a good postscript rip - and the work we do is just full of mixtures of transparency effects, overprinting and spot colors that the APPE is made to deal with. For work that has been converted from Brisque format to pdf, we use the CPSI rip when plating because we encountered artifacts on those jobs with the APPE.
-Dan

[Hopkins Printing]

Although we have both CPSI and APPE installed on our system, we prefer APPE all the way!

Cheers,
Jon Morgan
Hopkins Printing

[Joe]

APPE all the way. More reliable with later version PDF's loaded with transparency.

[Jackie]

APPE has stopped me from pulling all of my hair out . . .it handles transparency very well and no real issues so far.

[Dov Isaacs]

APPE has stopped me from pulling all of my hair out . . .it handles transparency very well and no real issues so far.

On behalf of Adobe and Adobe PDF Print Engine product team, we are glad to know that this technology is doing exactly what we intended it to do in terms of reliable PDF print publishing workflow for graphically complex content!

- Dov Isaacs (Spiritual Venture Capitalist behind the Adobe PDF Print Engine! )

[pkleinheider]

yespress,

I very much recommend to use APPE. This technology renders the PDF directly instead of going via Postscript (what CPSI technology was doing).

Advantages:
-) almost no problems processing PDFs with live transparency - the transparency gets rendered in HighRes and output as separations. No flattening, no artifacts, no sliced images or other graphical elements
-) higher speed
-) no more Postscript errors that still occurred when the PDF was too complex or was a little "wacky" due to the PDF to PS conversion before ripping
-) much better and reliable color conversion when working with device independent data (mostly ICC based RGB images)
-) possibility to map spot colors to CMYK during rendering which caused changes in visual appearance if beforemd before on a PDF level when dealing with transparency flattened files

Having such a technology I also recommend to accept (and even promote) to the creator the create PDF/X-4 files.

Peter

[yespress]

I would like to thank everyone for their input, it was most helpful. I started using the APPE rip and so far so good. Handles files with transparency beautifully, which was what I was hoping for. Thanks again everyone.