Another MIS in EFI’s crown: printLEADER
EFI, a world leader in digital printing innovation, announced that it has acquired the assets of privately held printLEADER. printLEADER, with headquarters in Palm City, Florida, is a provider of print MIS (management information systems) software products for the printing industry.
Number Press 6 (review)
From Bates numbering to variable data printing, with Praeter Software’s inexpensive Number Press 6 it’s all possible from the comfort of your Mac. With Number Press 6 you can print lottery tickets, number pages, or add unique codes to documents.
Review: DrawScribe, the natural way to draw vectors in Illustrator
Astute Graphics brought Illustrator users VectorScribe, which made life much easier for them. It now introduces DrawScribe, a plug-in with two tools: InkScribe and Dynamic Sketch. DrawScribe brings drawing the way drawing was meant to be to Illustrator. It’s a plug-in that gives you back the pleasure of drawing shapes with a pencil and paper, only digital.
Printing on Agfa Synaps XM synthetic paper
Paper is ecologically expensive; polyester substrates are less so. Books, journals, magazines and newspapers are still mainly printed matter. So are business reports, formal letters and much more. But there is an area where paper can better be replaced by synthetic materials that look and feel like paper but need to be stronger, less susceptible to environmental factors such as moisture and temperature.
Product Analysis of the VUTEk GS3200 Super-wide format printer
Specialised printing is a growing market. Together with short runs and print-on-demand, super wide format printing has strong appeal to advertisers. Super wide format technology has reached the point that it is also attractive to the art reproduction market. Some vendors in the super wide format printer market focus on high speed and offer low to decent quality only, but our tests of this 2+ metric tonnes heavy beast reveal a printer that can tackle photo quality.
Fiery XF 5 workflow RIP delivers
Fiery XF Version 5 is a flexible and scalable high-speed RIP and colour management workflow for wide- to superwide-format production with customizable automated workflows from job creation to printing and verification.
EFI Fiery wins “Perfect” label from VIGC
PDF/X-4 is the next big step in prepress, but until VIGC (Vlaams Instituut voor Grafische Communicatie — Flemish Innovation Center for Graphic Communication) actually set up a test for looking into the support of RIP vendors, nobody knew if there were any vendors who fully complied with this standard. PDF/X-4 needs the following parameters to [...]
Why UV LED curing printers are the better investment
Although you could theoretically keep refining old mercury vapour technology, that wouldn’t be future proof. A printer manufacturer that would invest in improving mercury lamp technology would show little understanding of environmentally sound development strategies. LED is future proof, opens up new, sometimes unexpected, markets, and the inks used are no more toxic than other industrial printing inks — less, actually, as ink manufacturers are all too eager to jump on the eco-friendly bandwagon.
EFI’s Technique Print MIS thrives
In November of last year, EFI acquired Technique, the British company that developed the printing MIS with the same name. While EFI did acquire all of Technique’s print MIS tools, it has left the products more or less as they are, only taking care of an integrated workflow with their Fiery digital front-end and inkjet portfolio including VUTEk, Jetrion and wide format devices. But what exactly is Technique, and how does it compare to for example EFI’s Monarch?
