Caldera Users.

[HulkSmash]

I don't post much anymore, but I really have to know a few things.

Anyone else have constant bugs and issues with caldera? We have been using caldera since Version 6(currently on 12 now), and we've put about $20,000 into it over the past 7-8 years. I feel like ever since they got bought out by Dover they've just taken a huge dive on the "customer first" aspect of their business. Their tech support is top notch but they never actually FIX my problems they just put a band-aid on it over and over and over, with no real long term fix.

Now they've gotten into this new rotation where they are releasing a new version yearly for 2-4k and all that version really does it HOT FIX the other version before it. They release 1 or 2 new things.. nothing game changing in the least. Along with that new version comes a WHOLE NEW SLEW of bugs.. that we will have to pay to fix in 12 months.

Has anyone else ever PAID for a software FIX? Because i feel like this is their thing to do...I feel like it's borderline extortion. They know we have no choice but to use this type of software to even run our printers.. they have no real competition. Onyx is garbage, Flxi is a joke.

We have constant cancellation of prints, Large panels that are randomly being sent to print from the rip at 1-2% smaller than it should be making panels not line up. They blame HP, Hp blames them.. it's endless circle of garbage.

wondering if anyone else experiences this?

 

[ProPDF]

Same here we jumped their eco system ship at version 10. We actually went back to Flexi 12 and run it directly on macs which has been very very stable for us surprisingly. Caldera will nickel and dime you to death and when upgrade season comes you get taxed on the rip and each module or machine driver you bought and they always come with a new fleet of bugs. My favorite tech solution was just re-install the software when patch after patch wouldn't work. When they told us they wanted $600 for channel manager, we did a demo and something was not right and we just stopped at that point. We may try them again later but as of now everything works so far with our needs and Flexi 12.

 

[jmcnicoll]

Used Caldera at my last job and we often thought the same thing that tech support never really fixed an issue, just a work around. That said, Caldera has some really nice features that work well but it really depends on their driver for your printer.

 

[ProColorGraphics]

I haven't had the issues you have had, but yes, I feel like they are really trying to nickle/dime you now after being bought out!!

I actually just watched the video of V13 coming out 10/1. I did purchase the CalderaCare last year, so I was told I will get that upgrade to V13 as part of that.

I too looked into Onyx, but saw too many issues others were having that I know I would have too. I have never used or looked into Flexi, so not sure what to think of that.

 

[HulkSmash]

A new one this morning. Randomly cancelling a 120" Panel of a 1200$ roll. Cool.

 

[HulkSmash]

ANNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNND it resent the job, canceled it "unexpected end of job" fed the entire job out, and automatically cut it out. wasting yet another 10 feet.

 

[jmcnicoll]

Have you tried to rip then print instead of printing as it's ripping?

 

[HulkSmash]

Have you tried to rip then print instead of printing as it's ripping?

yeah, of course. Honestly i've been using this software for almost a decade, and could literally support it as good as most of their techs..it's a coding issue

 

[jmcnicoll]

Have you tried it on a different printer?

 

[HulkSmash]

Have you tried it on a different printer?

it's too random to pinpoint when and where it will do it, but it happens to all my printers.

 

[ABA Visibility Products]

This is interesting. I've been on it since v7 and haven't seen anything like this-- at one point running 12 or so of the L25500 units as well as various other machines. How are you setup? Is it just one PC doing it all? Master/slave?

A while back we talked with Patrick and a couple of the other guys to understand if we need more cores or raw processing speed and they, in a nutshell, said both because of our mix of grand format and smaller machines. We invested in a top of the line Dell Server with both speed and cores, run Debian Mate on it, and use a product called NoMachine. We have fifteen licensed Caldera users and fifteen licenses for NoMachine. Each user logs in using the NoMachine client and has their own desktop. All of the printer drivers run off of this machine too. It's worked really well. Much more stable. I know you print a lot-- perhaps something like this would help.

And yes, Caldera is great at $$$$. I purchased fifteen licenses of the Adobe Print Engine back on v8. On Version 9 they came included with the product! I purchased the PDF PreFlight and now it is gone and so on. That being said Caldera is the best thing we did for Ripping. We tried Wasatch and Onyx and all they did was crash.

 

[Bly]

Caldera constantly crashes and wastes thousands in media and they rob you but Onyx is rubbish.
Good to know.

 

[HulkSmash]

This is interesting. I've been on it since v7 and haven't seen anything like this-- at one point running 12 or so of the L25500 units as well as various other machines. How are you setup? Is it just one PC doing it all? Master/slave?

A while back we talked with Patrick and a couple of the other guys to understand if we need more cores or raw processing speed and they, in a nutshell, said both because of our mix of grand format and smaller machines. We invested in a top of the line Dell Server with both speed and cores, run Debian Mate on it, and use a product called NoMachine. We have fifteen licensed Caldera users and fifteen licenses for NoMachine. Each user logs in using the NoMachine client and has their own desktop. All of the printer drivers run off of this machine too. It's worked really well. Much more stable. I know you print a lot-- perhaps something like this would help.

And yes, Caldera is great at $$$$. I purchased fifteen licenses of the Adobe Print Engine back on v8. On Version 9 they came included with the product! I purchased the PDF PreFlight and now it is gone and so on. That being said Caldera is the best thing we did for Ripping. We tried Wasatch and Onyx and all they did was crash.

We use a single mac to run out fleet of printers. It's honestly not an issue with hardware, or anything like that. It's a software issue. They're aware of it. But this is an interesting concept, ill look into it.

 

[Andy_warp]

Honestly have never had some of these issues I see with rips on this forum. I currently run Caldera, but have run Onyx Postershop and Production House. (liked em!)

I think Jmcnicoll says it best about it depending on the print driver. We run grand format so it's always been set up to just output a file we grab at the printer's front end.
Caldera spits out an .rtl file and a companion .png, Onyx used to output (8) 1-bit files for each print. (c,lc, m, lm, y, ly, k, lk)

Ripping files is nice because you know it's complete and good. We're very picky about the files we put through the rip too! I think what you feed the rip is just as important!

Sorry for your woes...wasted material is awful!

 

[jmcnicoll]

We also ran Caldera on a mac and we did have some similar issues when printing direct with caldera. However never did see this problem when outputting files for the printers internal print servers to print. Also, they use to say it was designed and ran better on a linux operating system.

 

[HulkSmash]

We also ran Caldera on a mac and we did have some similar issues when printing direct with caldera. However never did see this problem when outputting files for the printers internal print servers to print. Also, they use to say it was designed and ran better on a linux operating system.

We run it on a mac mini, a powerful one. The workstation isn't the problem. The software has constant glitches, that they know about - won't fix only bandaids..

We had interpreter error 4 times today cancelling prints.

 

[ColoPrinthead]

Wow, this puts my contour cutting issue with Onyx and my Summa into perspective (I have to try a new version they sent me yesterday and have been able to create a a wrok around). And I was pissed I might have to remake a few quicksets this morning . .

I have about $600 in material just sitting on my floor because our Caldera decided to quit working with our cutter and our version is not longer supported.