Prepress
Impostrip Photo Print Suite at PMA from Ultimate
Tuesday 29. January 2008 - Ultimate Technographics Inc, the pioneer and leading imposition software developer, announces at the PMA photo show in Las Vegas the Impostrip Photo Print Suite. Ultimate is demonstrating the back office photo print manufacturing system with partners DigiLabs, Duplo, HP, and Xerox.
“The demand is growing rapidly for the millions of digital camera users to print their pictures in new ways. They dont just want a stack of prints for a one time show, now they want specialty photo products like photo albums, cards, calendars to make their memories last,” explains Joanne David, Executive Vice President of Ultimate. “The question for photo labs and printers is how to produce these customized products in an efficient and profitable manner.”
There are new photo2print solutions offered on the internet today and now there is the back office production automation to produce the products in a hands-off way. Ultimate is offering a Photo Print Suite that helps digital printers to make money producing high volumes of photo products.
Impostrip Photo Print Suite
Impostrip Photo Print Suite automates the correct printing of photo albums, calendars and cards no matter how they are bound. Impostrip On-Demand produces stacked, folded and step and repeat lay-flats. Impostrip products process JPEG and other photo formats. The pages can be dropped into a hot folder that automatically processes the job regardless of page size and the number of pages.
Impostrip Book Stacker
Impostrip Book Stacker can output automatically parallel stacks of photo albums, photos and cards to minimize cutting and assembly of jobs after printing.
Impostrip Card Stacker
Impostrip Card Stacker can optimize the quantity of cards placed on the sheet to produce the maximum number of products per impression taking advantage of larger paper sizes, speeding imaging and eliminating waste.
The Impostrip products can add barcodes to the printed sheet and for each product ordered to automate finishing equipment and to help keeping track of the finished products to help managing shipping and packaging, so it is shipped to the right customer. All Impostrip products are automated by hot folders or XML, they input JPEG, PNG, BMP, TIFF, PDF, PS and EPS and output PDF or PS. They process Optimized PDF for image caching of repetitive objects to speed processing of variable data. They output multiple formats of barcodes. Some features are optional.
XML Photo Automation
An even higher level of automation can be achieved with the Impostrip XML interface to photo web2print systems. Systems like DigiLabs and IP Labs can now send Impostrip an XML job ticket that tells Impostrip exactly what you want to do with the job, giving you complete hands-off, error-free, production.
“We are very excited about working with Ultimate as the combination of our front end authoring software and their Impostrip imposition applications will deliver to customers not only powerful, compelling design and ordering tools but a highly automated, efficient workflow” says DigiLabs VP of Business Development, Andrew Friedland.
“Combining Ultimate’s impositioning products with ip.labs award winning consumer front end solutions provides an easy and cost effective method to set up a complete end-to-end workflow. This outstanding combination gives everyone the ability to participate to the fast growing photo specialty business.” Georg Sommershof, Managing Director, ip.labs.
Digital Presses are becoming Photo Labs
With the growth of digital cameras, the increasing print quality of digital presses, and the availability of efficient and cost effective software solutions more and more photo labs are putting in digital presses to produce customized photo products. Many digital printing companies are also expanding into photo labs as a way to expand business. They are increasingly using digital presses from partners like HP and Xerox.
All the way to photo product finishing
With Impostrip barcodes the process can be automated all the way though cutting folding and creasing on Duplo finishing equipment, to create a complete automated workflow from on line internet ordering all the way through finished product ready to be shipped to the customer.
“We wanted to present an interactive workflow to clearly demonstrate the power and significant productivity benefits that can be delivered by a complete end-to-end print production,” explains Si Nguyen, Head of Marketing of Duplo USA. “By teaming up with some of our industry partners, weve provided a hands-on opportunity for visitors to experience just how simple it is to automate production, which in turn offers significant cost savings in terms of eliminating manual intervention and potential inputting errors.”
Customization and Development Services
Ultimate has system analysts and programmers that are skilled at implementing custom imposition and document management solutions. They have done it for some of the largest manufacturers of digital imaging equipment in the business and they have done it for individual customers that need automation