Creo Vs Fiery RIP

[stdougal]

Hi,

We are currently looking at getting a Konica Minolta C8000. We have a choice between 2 rip's Fiery (IC-306) and Creo (IC-307). Despite researching the pro's and con's of each one I am still at a loss to decide which one is better.

We are an offset house that is starting to do a lot of VDP (Using Xmpie). Does anyone have any experience putting variable data files through any of these rip's. Which one is better at handling colours (matching to offset) and processing variable data (is there a difference in processing variable files speed wise?)

Any help would be greatly appreciated !!

Thank you

 

[ajr]

We have a Fiery pile of crap, get a Creo!!

Hope thats technical enough for you.

A

 

[[email protected]]

Creo

Creo

Fierys have come a long way however I think Creos have the edge, esp when it comes to VDP. The Fiery needs to reprocess alot of the time when you're making changes to files which can affect overall productivity. On the Ricoh C901 however I like the Fiery's ability to link output profiles with calibration sets and then with the paper catalog. Creo as far as I know can't do that.

 

[direxiondm]

Weve had a Fiery forever and have met our fair share of problems, Yes it needs to rerip a lot of the times, yes there are issues, yes creo has made a nice comeback with the latest rip. HOWEVER

EFI is currently in the process of slowly becoming the Workflow party to deal with when you get into Digital Print. If they manage to sell more DSF more Central and more CPS they might become the most supported workflow party ever. How about Creo? I know its good tech i know its smart thought of but they deliver a reasonably standard config for alle engines where EFI uses all engine capabilities to its best capacity.

What im saying is i think EFI will be developping more and faster solutions now the DP market has finally started to be taken seriously. Creo will be right behind so you need to decide :

Who is like Apple and who is like Microsoft and what provider suits me best.

 

[Amer]

I ran a Fiery, now on Creo so I have a knowledge of both and Creo is much better when it comes to VDP. XMPie will output VPS and the RIPing will go much faster. As far as color, Creo links calibration tables to paper type (unless you decide otherwise), so that's a no-brainer.

 

[Steve_S]

Don't touch the Fiery if you are used to offset work. The Creo will allow you much more consistency with color over time and for us, works much better for VDP. The Fiery has more doo-dads and gadgets but when it comes to production work, that is a moot point. Our customers don't want blue this month and purple next month, which is what we have seen from the Fiery.

 

[Guest]

Our company is upgrading our C1 to a KM6500. Konica is finding me a lightly used machine and a couple of them have the Creo rip and the latest one they've found comes with a Fiery rip. The sales gal is telling me the external Fiery with it is fully loaded with the Premium graphics package, spectrophotometer, color suite, etc., basically upgraded with everything possible. She says it is every bit as good as the Creo, but then again, she's trying to sell me the machine. We'll see! It handles VDP as well, which is something sort of new for me. Always something new to learn!

 

[BillV.]

We have had a Fiery for some time. Recently, we got a Creo. I hate it. I hate the fact that when doing imposition, SOMETIMES you get warning in the on-screen diagram if the imposition won't work, but SOMETIMES you don't. I'll impose a job, it looks ok, print a sheet and it's all wrong.

Or I'll step and repeat an image 8 up on a sheet. 7 will be fine and I'll get a gray box with an X in it where the eighth should be.

And then there's the little things. There's no "printed" cue. So when you print something it goes back to the "store" cue.

Or if I set up a job, get it exactly as I want it, I can't save the settings to apply to other jobs. I can make a virtual printer, but that seems like putting the cart before the horse.

As for not having to re-rip in the Creo, there's a downside to that. In the Fiery, if I have a large file to rip, I can test print the first 2 pages and it only rips those pages. If I make changes to the job's color settings and test it again, it will re-rip those 2 pages. Once I'm set, it rips the whole file. In the Creo, it rips the whole file, even if you just want to test print the first 2. There are changes you can make, like positioning, that won't require re-ripping, but if you make a color change that requires re-ripping, you have to wait for the whole file to re-rip, just to run a test sheet.

I told my boss I want them to swap the Creo for a Fiery.

 

[Colorblind]

We tested both Fiery and Creo rips about 18 months ago when it was time to upgrade our (then 2008 Fiery front-end) Xerox printers. We noticed that some complex InDesign and PDFX1a files would sometimes not render properly through Fiery, whatever we would try. Testing these very same files on the latest Fiery rip gave the same bad results. Creo handled those files perfectly at the first try. Also, we preferred the color management options of the Creo. That being said, we don't use the imposition or VDP features so I cannot comment on those.

 

[MailGuru]

@stdougal: Is the C8000 the only color digital printer you have? Do you have other color digital printers in your shop? If so, what are they front-ended with? You will hamper your overall production throughput if you have multiple printers all running different RIPs. Not only will your operators not be able to transfer RIPped files from one printer directly to another, but, they will need to learn and execute a different set-up & profile procedure for each different RIP. This absolutely kills productivity.

We have Fiery's on 3 printers. Love them. The Command Workstation Interface is the same on each printer. BTW we are heavy, heavy, heavy on some very complex variable image, variable data applications (24 to 36 page 6 x 9 booklets with a little over 5-million different variations of color images, pictures, color branded logos that have to be the exact dead-on color, text, PDF's, etc. Volume of about 10,000 per day) and the Fiery's seem to push through them effortlessly.
We push to them via XMPie outputting to PPML w/hot folders for each RIP

Can't really speak to the Creo, since, I've never tried one or benchmarked it side-by-side with the Fiery.

BTW - I am in no way connected with EFI, Creo, or XMpie.

 

[KopyBoss]

We tested Fiery & Creo on our 8000's and the Creo was better for our shop. Every shop has different needs test them both and go with what works best for your production needs.

 

[cosmo]

creo, 100% over the fiery, quicker & easier to use.

 

[BillV.]

Currently, we have an 8000 with a newer Creo RIP, a 6500 with an old Fiery RIP, a 6500 with an older Creo RIP. We also have 2 B&W canon copiers with Fiery RIPs.

There are things the Creo can do that the older Fiery can't. I don't know how the newer Fierys compare.

However, All our fiery servers can be seen and controlled by Command Workstation software on any PC or Mac in the place. Jobs can be dragged from one server to another in the Fiery system.

Not so with the Creos. The older Creo can't be seen by the Remote Workspace software. I can't monitor the printer from my desktop. I can't move jobs between the Creos like I can with the Fiery servers.

And there are little things like when I send a booklet job to the Fiery, it shows in Command Workstation how many copies are done, but the Creo shows how many total pages are printed. So if I want to know how many booklets have run I have to divide the number of pages run by the number of pages in the booklet.

 

[gig0]

Not so with the Creos. The older Creo can't be seen by the Remote Workspace software. I can't monitor the printer from my desktop. I can't move jobs between the Creos like I can with the Fiery servers.

Unless I'm mistaken, the IC-304's did have remote access. Unfortunately it was useless because it locks the screen of the RIP when you're logged in. Maybe someone deleted the executable because it shows up as a trojan with some anti-virus scanners? My asshat co-worker did that on two machines because MSE came up with a false flag.

Just install something like Logmein and you're set. It's free and gives you exactly what you need.

https://secure.logmein.com

 

[[email protected]]

On the Fiery in the Printed queue if you right-click on any of the columns you can add/remove various components including pages, copies and sheets. The Copies value would be the same as the number of booklets printed.