Has anyone installed Vista and tested it for print production? I've requested a new workstation with it installed for testing, but it will be a week before I get it.

From my internet research, I've learned that the two main standardised technologies that our workflows are based on (PDF and ICC colour management) have been replaced with Microsoft's own special brands.

Anyone have any hands on experience they would like to share?

I have installed vista in testing environments (and at home with the home media center stuff which is really cool, especially with streaming to an xbox 360) and can tell you that you should not have many problems with printing from vista.

Granted, vista specific drivers for most products aren't available yet, the same GDI hooks exist for XP based drivers so you should be fine.

Applications will still use the same GDI hooks to print until they are more "vista" aware of the new features that vista has. The color management side is a tad improved, still nothing like the mac side with color sync, but if you follow along you should be able to calibrate your display properly. Adobe products use the Adobe CMM which sits outside the windows environment anyway, and should be fine.

Still, I would encourage caution in production with vista and properly test your core applications in a test environment prior to implementation. How you hand color management, or 3rd party applications or accessories (like usb dongles for licensing, etc) might not work right until the vendor has vista drivers.

They even left in the legacy unix style lpr for old school printers.

That's not what I've heard from Chromix. What do you mean by 'calibrate your display properly'? From what I've been told, there's currently no way to use a spectrophotometer to calibrate your monitor in Vista. As soon as Vista does it's 'colour fade away' effect, your custom tables in your video card are gone. Also, Vista doesn't use ICC profiles.

Adobe products do use their own CMM, but it doesn't talk to Vista's CMM, so there no way for Photoshop (as an example) to display a colour corrected image on the monitor.

I'm more concerned about customers supplying us XPS files for output. Have you tried converting XPS into PDF files yet?

Ooops. Busted. I'm talking out my ass. It's not as bad as I was led to believe.

http://www.colorwiki.com/wiki/Vista%27s_Ne...nt_System_-_WCS

Vista does use ICC's. It has both the old ICM and it's newer WCS system. Two different colour management engines. So conceivably, you could have Photoshop displaying an image with one CMM, and converting it with another. Fun.

The video calibration thing sucks, but I have seen similar problems with XP machines (LUT-loader conflicts). The lack of control over TAC and Black Point compensation during CMYK conversions would also be a problem.