apogee vs xmf

[viclpp]

We are about to get a new system and i am not too familiar with these two. We outsource all of our prepress work to a vendor that is onsite. anyone have both experience of both workflow software?

[SteveAgfa]

Vic:

Have your local rep. give you local user contacts,
as since this might be a new venture for you, you
might want to have a cooperative relationship to
help in labor load-balancing and tips and tricks.

Regards,

[rich apollo]

Find out where you can go to "kick the tires". Agfa has a training facility in Massachusetts. I don't know where Fuji's is.

Take some of your client files to put through the workflow.

[michaelejahn]

I used to work for AGFA and think Apogee is swell. Very powerful. I now work for Compose and we develop and market Compose Express Workflow ( EWF ) which you might also consider testing. I agree with Steve and Rich - definitely want to test with your particular PDF files. While we do offer a 'try it before you buy it" with simple RIP products, with full on workflow products like these - 10-15k type products - we do an online demo - since no two workflows are the same, it is always about 2 hours to show processing submitted files in a "canned demo" - but depending on how deep you need to get (Trapping options, Complex impositions, specific setups with PiStop or Alwan) - it can stretch to a full day.

I see you are about 20 west of Houston, TX. Compose is located in Sacramento, CA.

Happy Hunting !

[snrv]

To be frank i used both, apogee is a very complex workflow and we used to face lot of problems with impositions and fonts etc. XMF is strightforward, simple and easy workflow. Before choosing try to check both workflows in all aspects and choose according what ur operators feel.

[Lukas Engqvist]

Hmm you say you had problems with impositions and fonts?? I can't see how that would be from Apogee. Apogee 6 will have impositions as a built in option, but earlier versions use preps templates. Where you using some strange templates, I've not had font or imposition issues with Apogee. Could be you are letting through some poor PDF's (ok sry there was a short while there was a bugg in CS4 that had potential font issues unless files were saved as PDFx4, but we got ours hotfixed before we actually had an issue of our own)

Be meticulous in your demands, (make sure you see the system with those demands and not with extra bells n whistles that are not included in your quote) and look through the contract carefully. These systems can be configured in so many ways it's easy to end up comparing apples and oranges.