Re: Entering the CTP Market
@ kaiserwilhelm
you wrote;
"I just simply like things to be the same on my screen as they are on the pdf as they are on the plate. Simple request, correct?"
jahn comments - things cannot be the same in your PDF and your ripped file, for one (and if you could somehow 'view' you plate in a PDF, well, thats just plain dumb, but if you could, well they would be different)
Dot gain compensation might be one reason. Even if you make a PDF, then process the PDF into a device dependent PDF, they are different. If you someohow make a PDF (or view screened 1 bit files) on screen, they are different. So, I am not sure you would want to somehow be 'fooled' into thinking they are somehow the same but some application. When I worked in Gravure prepress, we had no 'dot proof' - we engraved digitally direct to cylinder back in the the 80s using a helio. we depended in inkjet proofs. That is all we saw before running on press. These press runs sometimes reached 50 million. Weekly. These were retail newspapaer inserts from retailers who sold clothes, just so you understand this was not some schlocky printing.
Perhaps this is why I am so confused by all this interest in people examining intermediate files on screen - I am a fan of process control, tighting and testing and hard wireing your workflow, automating things and trusting it. Any tweak and color tuning is done FAR before the plate making process, and if you have your act together, you should be dragging PDF files into some folder and out pops the plates (or pages from some color digital proofing of printing device)
I have no idea what a '1 bit catcher' is. Any RIP has to write a file that is passed to a hardrive trough some bus & wires to the marking engine, so, from that perspective, all systems have bit generation and store and forward systems. Even a Xerox copier has a 'bit cartcher'
Perhaps you are speaking of a popular product with many Agfa customers - AGFA Print Drive Many other happy AGFA customers simply connect the RIP to the platesetter - if you have your workflow together, this works fine - years before platesetter, many were successfully making imposed film without Print Drive - did they world suddenly lose its mind and suddenly need to view these files, or did was it that we all decided we did not trust the guys upstream in prepress and finally had a way to see the file that was going to make our plates?
Or was it simply some great markerting ? <wink>
. If I were making sets of several plates for the same job (for a very long run, or if I were running the same job and multiple presses) I could see why I might want to rip then store 1 bit TIFF files, but me, I can tell you that I would prefer to NOT store such data, and would use AGFA Salient to simply re-rip the files and make new plates - for many users, they have no time for all this triple checking and simply make plates and trust they system they have set up.
If I recall, AGFA Print Drive offered a tool named "Quick Fix" - not sure if this is still available or if it were ever popular - but they idea is that you could select a small section of an application file or PDF, and using a Plug-in - just send this single very small section to the rip for very fast re-processing and then send this relatively tint set of bitmaps to 'burn' over the existing plates - this was a very impressive demo moment, and showed an advantage over re-ripping and entire 16 up imposed flat/form.
But in these days of very fast networks, SAN, NAS and 16 Gigs on board RAM on a networked RIP server, it would be fast enough to simply re-rip the flat.
As any system is due to fail, hot-swop drives and redundancy in your prepress workflow system is the only real protection, so I fail to see why a "3,000 Dell Box" is somehow the cause of your mistrust or makes you lose sleep somehow. 10% of all file processed incorrectly and take 80% of your time to discover why and correct it. I maintain that 94% of the files that do not process correctly are caused because they were not prepared correctly and were submitted into a production stream without preflight.
Setting up pre-production workflow is far more complex than making a PDF workflow decision or which platesetter or plate to bet the companys production on.
