Creo V. EFI. V. DocuSP

What are you using? What would you recommend?

We are in the process of purchasing a Xerox 5252 and Printable's FusionPro Desktop to get us in the Variable Color Market. Any of these three RIPs are available. Why choose one over the other?

Thanks!

Well, it all depends on what you are looking for.

EFI is a good office level RIP, so if you are doing powerpoint and such its really good.

Creo is a solid front end but now owned by Kodak so it makes getting Xerox to support complex issues very difficult. EFI has this same issue as they sell their RIP's to Canon and others, but at least they stay out of the printer market. Creo also has the widest variety of support for all the different variable data languages out there.

DocuSP is Xerox's own RIP. Built off the black only tradition, it is a solid RIP, full of complex features and the only one on a Solaris platform.

With FusionPro as your composition engine, I highly recommend you create some test files or use the tutorials that come with it to test the 3 rips, output the files to PDF, PS, VPS, PPML, and VIPP and see which RIP is able to produce the output the fastest and most consistent with what was composed.

We have had Creo's and we are very happy with how it works with FusionPro, processing optimized PDF's faster then VIPP and everything else.

Good luck.

I agree with what Patrick said, and strongly encourage you to take the advise about testing output files from Fusion Pro on each of them. Consider time to rip, ability to rip while print and capabilities of gallop mode. I would not even consider looking at the EFI rip.

As for the creo vs. docusp...

For years creo has been regarded as the only suitable rip for the commercial print world. Primarily for how they handle color management. I don't know if that is really the case any more. Keep in mind, none of these rips are PDF rips yet. I would be asking questions about when each one is going to be.

Are you in a commercial print or inplant enviroment? Though both can do the job, I believe the DocuSP wins when it comes to recurring manufactured print. A set of jobs run daily, weekly, etc.

Hope some of that insight helps.

We use both EFI Fiery and Creo at the business i work at. I have no experience with Creo but from what i've heard Fiery has a more graphical interface while Creo remembers settings and ripped data resulting in faster processing.
Creo lets you set how many copies you want while in Fiery you set sheets.

Fiery does a decent job, with simple color management as its main strength. The downside is that the Compose & Impose functions are totally incompatable. The overrated paper catalog jumbles all your entrees. and the PDF previews are locked to low resultion which makes it very hard to bleed two pages with trim marks together.

Another annoying thing is that anything you deside to archive in EFI can't be exported from the archive.