I meant Printready.

[JayB]

Not PressReady.

[westietc]

I have done an exstensive 6 mounths testing & evaluation on both systems and if your client base is very user intensive i.e. your prepress operators need to do a lot of manipulation to the files prior to postscripting and sometimes after postscripting to get the desired result for your clients than I suggest you look into the Printready system as it has many tools to change files on the fly without having to go back to the original files and manipulate them and the re postscript, the imposition application called Signa is very powerful and user friendly with rules that put colour bars and crop marks automatically on the impo and it will allow you to create any imposition that you can think of as long as it can be guilotined or bound.
The prinergy system is not as user friendly if you need to manipulate files after they have been ripped by the system, also the imposition application i.e Preps does not give you the same abailities to add multiple impositions and to remove creep(shingling) from a single page, preps is built more for simple bookwork impositions not for complex work and you need to place colour bars and marks for every signature which can be time consuming.

Don't get me wrong the Prinergy system is a good system but it is not as extensive or robust and user friendly as the Printready system, out of 100 printready scored 88 and Prinergy scored 71.

Hope this helps.

[steppy]

When you say "Printready system, out of 100 printready scored 88 and Prinergy scored 71", what do the numbers refer to? Has someone done a coprehensive comparison/reveiw?

thanks

[westietc]

Hi Steppy
I listed all the paramaters that a prepress department needs which was approximately 20 items from trapping to colour matching to colour changes and to alterations and gave them a rating from 1 to 6, 1 being not that important and 6 being very important and most used in the prepress wiorkflow. From there I rated each subject by ease of use and flexibility and practicality and gave a score from 1 to 10. this was then multiplied by the original rating of each subject and the final scores of each system where then added and divided by the maximum score to give me a percentage for each system.
In my 19 years of being a prepress operator and then an Technical supervisor for prepress departments I can honestly say that the Heidelberg system was clearly well thought out and setup with all kinds of prepress issues that you might come up against.