Apogee Users

[gabrielp]

We are looking into moving to Apogee from Rampage. It's a big jump in cost over Rampage, and Rampage seems to work well for us, it's just that it was sunsetted and will soon end its support life, so we feel the need to move. Me not being too versed in what rips offer, I'm hoping getting a new system like Apogee will allow us to do some new things that could give us a little ROI to help justify the cost to move.

I was wondering if anyone here uses it and if they would share their thoughts. Does it play well with Switch? What annoyances have you run into? Would you buy it again?

[lombert]

We moved to Apogee almost a year ago and still we need to learn and change and fix things so they work like we want it to work. It's a very complex system, sometimes you can wonder how they design the system to, us users or the system tech. it's a lot of parameters and then you think it works, you have to change something else.

In our production it couldn't take over the Indigo-production, it's takes to long to set up the "work" to produce it. You work much faster in SmartStream in Indesign/Switch and in the Indigo.

If you have setup the apogee to work with templates like A4, 12 pages, it is very fast to rip. But you have to set up one template for every 4-pages eg. 4, 8, 12, 16 and so on, where is no automatic (easy) way for apogee to handle that.

For the offset-presses it works, but still to many parameters in every work to set it up.. If you can, go to some company and talk to the production and see, don't just the sales person.

It works with JDF, and handles it ok.

Some bigger connection with Switch is not there, it has in and out hot folders and so on.

And one more thing is the included PitStop is ver10.