ImagePress C1 Server Advice

[StacyJoh]

My business is considering purchasing a C1+ for our graphic design studio. We are currently using a Canon CLC 1140 with a Kodak Polychrome server that has 2.5 GHz XEO intel chip. We are concerned about the difference between the T1 and the Q2 fiery rip that is offered with the C1+. The T1 is a 1.5 GHz Celaron chip (laptop chip?), which sounds much less powerful than what we are used to in ripping power/time. Does anyone have any experience with outputting large files (1 GHz or more) on either of these two servers?

The Q2 offers more graphics and color software which we don't necessarily have to have, but we are more worried about the speed of output or the difference we might encounter going from our current machine to this new one and the lower level T1 server.

Any advice is helpful! Thank you!

 

[xpquickprint]

The fiery rip powered by the celeron is a dog for freeform variable data on complex documents, but for general printing it would likely be fine. How many individual jobs do you want / need to print per hour?

 

[StacyJoh]

Reply

Thanks for your input! Right now we don't do a lot of printing really per hour, we just generally have jobs to output that are Photoshop layer intensive. We could make our files pdfs and lower the file size before printing bigger files each time, but I just wondered if we would grow weary of the slower rip'ing times.

Also I became confused regarding dpi on both the T1 and the Q2. The T1 specs say it has resolution of 600dpi and that is a result of the driver software. If you upgraded the driver to PCL 6 you can get 1200 dpi. But is that as simple as an upgrade and you don't lose processing time or what?

The Q2 specs say nothing in them about resolution but I'm assuming its always 1200 dpi? Any thoughts there?
Appreciate your help!

 

[nicnaknet]

The engine always prints at 1200dpi, it is just the raster job can be either 600dpi or 1200dpi. Usually 600dpi is the better choice, your customers won't see the difference. From memory there are some differences between the T1 and Q2 in regards to handling the clear varnish, so might want to ask about that.

 

[StacyJoh]

Thanks for your response. I'm not sure I understand what you mean by the "raster" job being either 600dpi or 1200dpi. Is that something you select before you print and then the machine will always print at 1200dpi. However, I can't imagine that something rastered at 600dpi as opposed to 1200dpi and then printed at 1200dpi would show very little difference!? I guess too I am wondering what our current CLC 1140 is printing at and rastering at? Just for comparison.
But in all honesty, speed of the rip is more my concern when trying to decide between the T1 and the Q2 I think.

 

[nelsmy]

If you really go concern on color accuracy, go for Q2, don't go for T1, T1 class server can't do much... regarding speed, yup c1 is a bit slow... i take 95mins to print double side 90 pages A3 artwork... media is 220 artcard. Frankly speaking, I just get my machine 1 week ago... up to now, i quite happy with it... don't know what will happen soon.. but hope can share and learn more in this forum...