Should we transition to a dedicated RIP (Onyx vs. Caldera)?

[tollerdad]

We are transitioning to PrintFactory away from Caldera and Onyx. Primarily for the ease of color management and all the modules it comes with that others charge more for like True Fit nesting and Cutting. Also understand Caldera's main tech team now work for PrintFactory so that product may be shortlived. Highly recommend checking it out. Our vendor is Alder Color Solutions.

 

[dypinc]

I had a demo of Print Factory to test out earlier this year. I never could get Pure Primaries to print correctly (very important with Latex Black) nor could I find away to see what the output values to the printer actually were, and I never could get any answers from Print Factory. They acted like they really didn't care.

 

[Pauly]

Employees done and go with every business. Usually to the other side.

We moved from Onyx to caldera. Not looking back.
I looked at print factory, but caldera does exactly what I need it to do, we rip over 500 files a day without issues.
Runs all our equipment.
Colour management is done by xrite, which is very industry standard and quite good.

 

[k_graham]

Looking for opinions on dedicated RIP software like Onyx and Caldera.

Our shop currently runs 5 Roland roll to roll printers, and 6 Graphtec plotters. We like Versaworks (free) and we like Cutting Master (free). We do a lot of print/cut jobs utilizing the Roland/Graphtec combo, and it's great.
I really don't WANT to change anything, but it seems that it will become necessary if we ever decide to get something other than Roland for printing. We're looking into flatbeds and it seems unavoidable.

So far I've only looked closer at Onyx and I honestly have a huge issue with their business model. Subscription, upgrade, upgrade, upgrade, upgrade. You have to pay extra for additional concurrent RIP processes - Seriously? I've reached out to their sales and was told it'd be "In the ballpark of $13k", most of which is a one-time pay, and "There would be an optional annual cost of roughly $1,800 if you would like support, version and driver updates, and a couple of additional subscription features for Thrive".

Coming from the Roland / Versaworks ecosystem (free), I just don't see how that much money makes sense at all. How does it translate? It seems as though everyone has accepted this huge cost - why?

Is Caldera any better? Does anyone feel passionately about recommending we switch to a dedicated RIP? What are we missing out on?!

Any thoughts would be appreciated. Thanks.

We went with HP printer being remote and thinking we could replace our own print heads with it, and could also print and cut on separate cutter the same day.

With our 1st RIP I had built a computer for the task from components with intent to build a 2nent with with Windows for our Coreldraw use if with Caldara Linux. Thus I received a full working demo of Onyx on disk and with Caldara was able to download.
The demo did not take long, on the 1st Corel file Onyx could not complete it, I called in and the message was to have my paid support licence ready. I don't believe they could fix it, at the time they had just introduced the Adobe print engine. Caldara on the other hand handled the file perfectly with its Adobe print engine.

A few years went by and HP did the dirty deed of stopping parts and consumeables on our printer and in spite of that we went with their next generation printer which though considerably faster has had a couple of manufacturing flaw issues, and it turned out we haven't had the call for the white ink(paint) capability. On the Caldara side we had to buy an upgrade for the different printer and at that time the Mac M2 was pretty new. We decided to upgrade the hardware from PC Caldara RIP to the Mac M2. Reasons for this was that although the PC Caldara worked it was strictly a RIP, we could not even install a printer driver for other printers on it. The Mac operating system allowed us to use it as a Mac, install any other printer drivers like for our Color copier via Fiery. The only issue with the Mac I can think of is this was going in while I was retiring and the Mac seller sold them cordless mouse and keyboard which seemed to be delayed typing and movements so they had to go to wired and the Ethernet was wired anyway. Caldara for the win.

 

[balstestrat]

Caldera is getting quite greedy. You need to have the care subscription to get flatbed cutting.

Onyx is cheaper and alright.

 

[Bonzai901]

We used Caldera for over 10 years, my old boss got it because he saw great potential on cutting time on printing without crashes on rasterlink, better control on tiling for wall graphics and croping windows on vehicle wraps, on top of that you can do nesting and composing files; it is pricey but worth it if you do quite some work, and they do have good support, if there is something you can fix they will fix it using teamviewer and all you do is watch

 

[Bobby H]

My workplace is an all-Windows shop. So Caldera is a no-go for us.

Our first large format printer was a Roland VersaCAMM VP540. We used the VersaWorks RIP, but it was a pain in the ass getting around some of the application's limitations. We started using Onyx Thrive when we bought our first HP Latex 360 printer. The limitations I had with VersaWorks were gone with Onyx. Our shop added a second HP 360 and then a 700W. I really don't like the 700W for all the damned racket it makes. My work desk is in the same room with it and some other gear. I have to wear noise cancelling earphones while working to block out that noise (as well as other distracting stuff in the office).

Recently we added a CET flatbed printer that came from another shop. That was an expensive upgrade. We had to bump our Onyx 21 license up to version 25 just to add the CET. And then adding the CET itself into Onyx Thrive was another costly ding. We have another flatbed, a Mimaki unit driven by RasterLink Pro. But it isn't as fast at the CET.

Regarding cut-only jobs in Onyx, they are indeed a pain in the neck to get to work. It's always a matter of trial and error to find the one flavor of SVG that Onyx will be willing to "see" that particular day. On the flip side, I've never had a problem getting paths inside a PDF that were assigned a CutContour spot color to work properly. That was something that was hit or miss with VersaWorks.