Print Shop Mail & Ricoh C900

[fourpaula]

I use Print Shop Mail a lot with my C900 & I am having an unbelieveably slow rip time. I have a file that is 1400 sheets 13X19 sheets or 4200 postcards. If I send the file all together it locks up the Fiery attached to my C900. I had to send the job in 5 batches to allow it to process. Each batch took 45 minutes to an hour just to process. The printer actually printed batches faster than it processed them. This happens with all the VDP jobs we process. We also use Direct Smile which doubles the processing time. I have a few jobs that are 10K pieces which I know will take more than a day at that rate.
Anyone know a way to speedup processing?

[impression]

Check to make sure you have VDP Technology set to Optimized Postscript and not standard.

[fourpaula]

It is set to Optimized. Getting is from print shop mail to the printer normally doesn't take that much time. Ocassionally it will take some time. It is when the Fiery on my C900 rips the file normally.

[FlikP]

Simple swap your Fiery RIP for a Creo C80 controller as this RIP is designed for Variable Data work using both VPS/PPML/OPS/OPDF etc and there loads of case studies out there!

It not only works great with VDP but the overall colour stabbility and speed is very impressive - go and kick Ricoh and mention its not fit for purpose.

[Bo3b]

Would have to agree that the Creo rips handle VDP jobs better than any other rip on the market - for any printer supplier!
However I am surprised that the Fiery is taking so long on these jobs. Perhaps it has something to do with the way the VDP jobs are being created? I'm more familiar with PSMail for the Mac than for PC - shame that Objective Lune seem to have abandoned the Mac version - PSMail was a Mac program long before it ever appeared on a PC when Atlas were making it.
Some things to remember…
If you have any variable text, try to get it in as small a text box as you can. If you put variable text in a big text block then the whole text block becomes variable so cacheing won't help ripping performnace.
In PS mail if you can set the background colour of any element to white instead of the default transparent, then the program doesn't have to workout if any object are to be visible or not - obviously you can only do this if the background to these objects is white.
Make sure you check any/every option that mentions using the rips cacheing ability - I've seen even properly designed jobs (on a Creo no less)
take 3-4 hours to rip around 300 records with cacheing not enabled - turning on cacheing and the entire 20,000 record job ripped within 10 minutes

I'm fairly certain that the later Fiery rips handle VPS as well as PPML, both of which should give better ripping performance than optimised PostScript. I don't think their VPS implementation is as good as Creos however - VPS is a Creo invention after all

[FlikP]

Bob,

Agree with your comments however dont forget that EFI reverse engineered VPS support for their RIPS!!

[MIBUK]

Have you tried sending the file as PPML, which the Fiery supports? Also, the Fiery has something called Freeform where the static form is held on the Fiery...which means only the variable data is sent. This is supported by PrintShop Mail.

Try the above options to see what results you get

[FlikP]

EFI is an office RIP and not a 'true' production RIP - you will stuggle with PPML too even though its supported.

[fourpaula]

This card had a 300 resolution PDF for the front & back with a 3X1 text box & a .75X.25 text box. The 2 boxes did have transparent backgrounds. Making the background white made no difference at all. Cache didn't seem to make a difference either. I'm working on the free form still. I'm not as familiar with that feature.
I looked at the memory in my Fiery & is has 512MG I thought that was pretty low for a computer that processes graphics. My Ikon tech told me that we can't put more memory in it because the program will not recognize it. Could anyone with this machine tell me how much memory they have?

[JayDA]

EFI is an office RIP and not a 'true' production RIP - you will stuggle with PPML too even though its supported.

I call BS, please provide something to substantiate this. I run 5 color machines, every one of them with a Fiery, and I put VDP work through them all day without any problems. Someone asks for help with their Fiery, and your answer is "buy a Creo"...really?

OP, email or PM me, we use PrintShopMail and PlanetPress to do VDP runs all day...I would be happy to help if I can.