Any feedback regarding the KM IC-603 Print Controller?

[CliffSpielman]

I'm in the process of selecting my first press. One candidate is the KM C2060 - in part due to lease pricing, which is better than the Xerox Versant 80 or Canon C650. At least based on current rates. KM says that the IC-603 print controller is basically as effective as a bustled Fiery. As usual, I'm skeptical. I do see that the IC-603 offers APPE, which is a good thing.

More often than not, I'll either be printing from InDesign or PDF's exported from InDesign. My designs are not complex but do have very small font sizes...like less than 2pt.

Has anybody had experience with the IC-603 print controller? For reasonably simple needs, can it suffice in lieu of a Fiery? Does it make a difference simply in terms of sharpness of black text? thx

 

[jwheeler]

Hi Cliff, I will start off by saying that I do work for Konica Minolta, but I’m out of California and would not benefit either way from your decision.

I just wanted to give you some input based on some tests we did for a customer in the same predicament.

As a former graphic designer working in a Print shop that used Fiery, I really love the interface and tend to recommend it for commercial printers, mostly for the power of the Impose/Compose/Job Master plug-ins that make imposition so easy. If you don’t need those features, then the KM controller is faster at processing than the embedded Fiery. You still get the advantage of Job Centro for Job queing, but it only has basic impostion. We had a customer debating between the two and luckily in my demo room we have both. We tested a very large file that was bogging down their current rip. The KM controller won by a long shot. The reason is because it starts printing while still ripping, as opposed to the Fiery would not start printing until the whole file was ripped.

The color will come out the same on both as long as it’s calibrated, both have Job queing, you can edit Color curves and spot colors on both. They both offer basic imposition like booklet, 2up, 4up. But if you need more advanced imposition for gutters, custom ganging, numbering, etc, you will need to do that upstream in InDesign etc with the KM controller or add Impose/compose/jobmaster to a fiery controller