A simpler/cheaper way of working with the Agfa Palladio CTP?

[MAC.NETWORK]

My company is running an Apogee X system with Print Drive, a Palladio PlateSetter and Best RIP/Epson Proofer. Every few years Agfa require a huge sum of money to upgrade the system and keep us on the upgrade merry-go-round. This time it's £10,000 but we're a small printer with one prepress guy on a Mac and a single four colour press! Agfa only seem to have systems that seem more appropriate for major print shops with several presses and unlimited funds. How can it cost so much money to print imposed separations to a lowly B&W device?
In such a small company as ours there isn't any real need for the Apogee workflow which currently runs on two massive HP Proliant servers, one of which is purely a backup server; they both have RAID 5 disk arrays, redundant power supplies and three network cards. But the output goes through an ancient Windows 2000 PC running Print Drive which has a single SCSI card connected to the Palladio.

Can someone suggest a simpler/cheaper way of working with the Palladio while staying up to date with new PDFs etc.?

 

[Sev]

We gave up on Agfa, and moved on to Kodak. Our Palladio and PrintDrive is sitting on the shop floor doing nothing. Close to a year ago we installed a Kodak Trendsetter, with Prinergy Evo to run the device. We switched to Kodak Thermal Direct plates, so no more plate processor and icky chemistry. At the same time, we installed the Kodak color proofing system, using the Epson 7890 with the Xrite SpectroProofer. I would have to say that the move from Agfa to Kodak was a very good move.

-Sev

 

[zombie]

Get a Harlequin Rip and use it with PrintDrive.

 

[Paul Santer]

You can drive your device with a third party Tiff catcher or RIP if your Print Drive doesn’t have 1-Bit Tiff support. Once you have the ability to drive the device with 1-Bit Tiff you can use any workflow or RIP that supports 1-Bit Tiff output.
Most RIP’s or WorkFlows can drive the Epson Proofer direct without the need for the Best RIP.

 

[Sustainable]

My company is running an Apogee X system with Print Drive, a Palladio PlateSetter and Best RIP/Epson Proofer. Every few years Agfa require a huge sum of money to upgrade the system and keep us on the upgrade merry-go-round. This time it's £10,000 but we're a small printer with one prepress guy on a Mac and a single four colour press! Agfa only seem to have systems that seem more appropriate for major print shops with several presses and unlimited funds. How can it cost so much money to print imposed separations to a lowly B&W device?
In such a small company as ours there isn't any real need for the Apogee workflow which currently runs on two massive HP Proliant servers, one of which is purely a backup server; they both have RAID 5 disk arrays, redundant power supplies and three network cards. But the output goes through an ancient Windows 2000 PC running Print Drive which has a single SCSI card connected to the Palladio.

Can someone suggest a simpler/cheaper way of working with the Palladio while staying up to date with new PDFs etc.?

We have a pallado, printdrive, and apogee pdf rip 3.1. You don't need to change a thing. Use INdesign to do the color serperations and trapping and then send it to the Apogee PDF rip.
Indesign handles all of the transparency issues and flattening and separations. We have been doing this since 2005 when Agfa wanted over $25,000.00 for an upgrade. The rip will work for many more years with INdesign doing all of the grunt work. With the proper high end computer for Indesign you can flatten,trap,color seperate and 8 page flat in about 3 minutes. We have had some take over 30 minutes that had 350 pictures and lots of tranparency art. Doing this transforms the PDf rip it to just a tiff rasterizer without a care in the world.

 

[maxon]

Call xitron, they have just released Navigator RIP kits for Palladio compatible with low voltage and high voltage scsi interfaces, check which one applies to your platesetter.

 

[Sev]

You can drive your device with a third party Tiff catcher or RIP if your Print Drive doesn’t have 1-Bit Tiff support. Once you have the ability to drive the device with 1-Bit Tiff you can use any workflow or RIP that supports 1-Bit Tiff output.
Most RIP’s or WorkFlows can drive the Epson Proofer direct without the need for the Best RIP.

As far as I know, 1-bit tiffs from PrintDrive do not work with other systems. When we sent 1-bit tiffs out of PrintDrive to Kodak to make us a set of test plates, Kodak reported that the 1-bit tiffs from PrintDrive would not work. So I sent 1-bit tiffs created from our workflow (Esko Artworks Nexus) and those worked fine. So for plate making, we send 1-bit tiffs from Nexus to Prinergy Evo, which is our Tiff catcher. However, we do use the Kodak color proofing RIP to drive our Epson. We had a profile created by Kodak which makes our proofs match our presses perfectly. We used to have our presses match our proofs, but now we have the proofs match the presses. So, when a contract proof is signed off, the press run and the proofs look identical.

-Sev

 

[MAC.NETWORK]

Sustainable,
I like your style and thanks for your comments but I suspect the devil's in the detail. How would you manage imposition and how to deal with Quark jobs that come through the door? "Use InDesign to do the colour separations and trapping" (creating what exactly?) and then send what type of files to the PDF RIP?
Is it as simple as converting the job into PDFs and then placing them on an InDesign template? And then print to the Apogee queue?

 

[MAC.NETWORK]

Thanks Zombie, I do like the Harlequin RIP but do you have suggestions for imposition to replace Agfa's Preps. Could we ditch the ancient Print Drive and use an interface card in the Harlequin Mac/PC. Also could the Epson be printed to directly by the Harlequin? We could replace the Print Drive hardware, since we have an updated USB dongle but have you managed to make a Harlequin print to the Print Drive? Does that need a special plugin or does it work using standard tiff output to a folder?

 

[prepressing]

You can use the Harlequin TIFF RIP to output a 1-bit TIFF (separations) to the Print Drive computer and an 8-bit TIFF (composite) to the BestRIP which would then be output on the Epson. You could also output a PDF Raster file which can be emailed or sent via FTP to customers or sent over to the BestRIP for proofing. If you want to add an Epson proofer we have different plugins available depending on the model.

You can find out more about the TIFF RIP-Kit on the following page:
TIFF Software RIP for Computer to Plate CTP - TIFF Separation Software for Platesetters 1-bit, 1bit or 8-bit, 8bit

We sell the inpO2 product from Dynagram for imposition. If you are using InDesign or another design application you can just save out as PDF and place the PDFs into inpO2 before sending over to the RIP software. There is also automation available as well as other options depending on your needs.

TrapPro is available as an in-RIP trapping option. If you are already manually setting traps in the design application the RIP will obey these traps, but if you want to have the RIP automatically trap jobs on the fly as they are being processed, that would require the purchase of TrapPro.

 

[zombie]

@MAC.NETWORK

You can get the latest Preps, since your familiar with it, or try any other Imposition software (most of them have Demo versions, so you can see what's good for you). You cannot drive Palladio wit HQ without a proper interface card, and I don't think there is a HQ plugin who can work with APIS. PrintDrive can import 1 bit TIFF from Harlequin, as long as you have the proper license. You can use Harlequin for driving your Epson (with proper plugin), but I am not sure about the result. BestColor you have is a rip suitable for proofs, not sure how good HQ proofing plugins are. And yes, you can use standard TIFF output to a folder.

Also check your PM.

 

[lfelton]

Can someone suggest a simpler/cheaper way of working with the Palladio while staying up to date with new PDFs etc.?

I suggest you look at Studiorip, they should be able to work out a solution for you that's a lot more cost effective. We moved over to this a couple of years ago and have been very pleased with it. The guys in the UK are very helpful. We use a Agfa Azura plates, 200lpi hybrid screening (off of our Screen 4300S) and you can't fault the quality.

 

[Sustainable]

Sustainable,
I like your style and thanks for your comments but I suspect the devil's in the detail. How would you manage imposition and how to deal with Quark jobs that come through the door? "Use InDesign to do the colour separations and trapping" (creating what exactly?) and then send what type of files to the PDF RIP?
Is it as simple as converting the job into PDFs and then placing them on an InDesign template? And then print to the Apogee queue?

Yes is is that simple. We have processed close to 100,000 jobs using this. In fact just about any old rip will work like this. They can process a seperated file. It doesn't matter where the flattening or trapping or seperating is done as long as the rip can make the 1 bit tiff for plate making. This process hasn't changed since film recorders then ctp came about. The rip just processes the file. The trick is how do you present the file to the rip so it doesn't hiccup. If you run into some pms color issues just rename the color to cmy or k. The rip doesn't care about color nor does the recorder(ctp or film) or the the plate or press.
The press can't tell what color of ink the plate was made for. Say you need a plate for warm red just make it using the black separation or any of the other process colors depending on what screen angles you want. Always keep in mind that the rip, plates,press and so on DON'T care what color it is. You determine that when you put ink in the press.
We have been doing this for over 20 years. The software guys try to make it to complicated.

 

[MAC.NETWORK]

Thanks for everyone's input on this. I agree that software developers like to make it complicated, just because you can do something in software doesn't mean you need to and all the bells and whistles of workflow management, job tickets etc. are often irrelevant for small printers.
The end process in PrePress production is a stupidly simple 1-bit image so I was staggered to see how much kit Agfa thought it necessary to sell to do this. The last upgrade was two huge HP Proliant multi CPU servers running Apogee X, one is simply a backup but they both have 5x2.5" disks in a RAID array and 3x Gigabit network cards of which only 1 is connected to a cheap 10/100 switch. All this was fed by the one and only studio Mac, a single CPU 800MHz G4, and all of this relies on Agfa's Print Drive running on a 10 year old Windows 2000 server connected to the Palladio. It's absolutely insane!
I like the idea of using InDesign to overcome future problems, anything that reduces complexity is a good, especially when you're struggling to get through a recession. I have just read that the Palladio could connect directly to the Apogee PDF RIP without Print Drive (useful if it should fail). The connection is SCSI not APIS on the Palladio so a Harlequin or StudioRIP would be able to interface without too much trouble if it came to that.

 

[Remedon]

Hello, please i am looking for Agfa Palladio Machine to buy.

Anyone with a processor or without a processor.

Thanks to anybody with vital info on where to get any.

You can reply here or contact me at bikes_28 at hotmail.com