Is Flexi the only RIP for HP Printers?

We used Onyx at my last shop to run our HP L260.

 

I've never used Flexi, but I love ONYX. I've ran HP Scitex and HP latex machines (among other brands as well) using ONYX. It's has a lot of great features and is compatible with a ton of equipment. I especially like the color management features it offers. But anyway HP and ONYX do play very nicely together.

 

Oh my no. https://www8.hp.com/us/en/commercial-printers/latex-printers/rips.html

Colorgate
Onyx
Caldera

This seem to be the favorites. That all have demos you can get to try.

 

Flexi comes with some of the models included in the price. If you decide to use the Flexi RIP, you don't have to use the design side of it. You can just open up most common file types in Production Manager and print from there.

 

So to answer you first question, no Flexi is not the only rip that you can use. It's just a corporate synergy thing. You should be able to use any rip you want. If you did decide to go with Flexi you would not have to design in it. I often design in Composer, Illustrator, Photoshop and Corel. You would just need to save your files in a format that Flexi Production manager can read the safest bet would be .pdf. Flexi Design is capable reading .eps, .ai, .psd, .png, .jepg, .pdf, .tiff and more so if you wanted to create the bulk of the art in another software but put the finishing touches in Flexi you can do that as well.

 

Be willing to bet the people at cadlink can hook it up.

 

There are several certified RIP's, Signlab isn't one of them.

And there are some available special HP Editions of Flexi-Software with additional functionality. The HP FlexiPRINT Basic Edition for example (delivered with print-only 115, 315, 335, no contour cutting, no design) can't do contour cutting, but this functionality can be added (with banner tools and much more included) for little money.

With the Print and Cut-Bundles comes a FlexiSIGN & PRINT-RIP which costs around 3'000 $ if buying separately. This RIP even have the ICC-Profiler included. No bad choice to drive a HP Latex.

 

Onyx is the easiest to use and also extremely advanced.
Reach out to me if you need any help.
Bruce 631.520.3074

 

I do Onyx-Sales and Support too, but would never state that Onyx is „the easiest to use“.

 

"There are several certified RIP's, Signlab isn't one of them. "
Sounds like a great reason not to buy an HP printer. Among others.

 

For you.... For me Flexi is really easy to use and with the the HP latex series they communicate together really well.

 

Not totally true. You can add any PSD, EPS, PDF, TIF, JPG....etc....straight to RIP without running through Flexi. Only jobs you HAVE to run through Flexi would be print and cut stuff.

 

Yes that's what I said.... "You would just need to save your files in a format that Flexi Production manager can read the safest bet would be .pdf. "

 

Not true. It is possible to prepare jobs too in Illustrator, CorelDraw and so on to be processed in the Flexi-RIP as Print and Cut without processing them through Flexi Editor. It is the same like doing it for Onyx: preparing paths with a spot colour named "CutContour", "CutContour1" and so on.

But of course the Flexi-Editor have nice functionality to create contour paths easily.

 

Every RIP Vendor could let HP certify their RIP-Products for HP-printers ... of course if their drivers match the HP specifications. It looks like that Cadlink don't have working drivers for that printers.

 

Interesting...I'd love to see how you do that. Adding an AI or EPS with CutContour, for me, yields nothing in the Plotter RIP. There's no way that I can see that adding the job separates the 2 like Flexi does when you send to print/cut.

 

I do Flexi support and user training for more than 20 years.

There is a file with the name „cut contour test“ in the postscript sample folder in the Flexi application folder, try it. As soon as adding a job like this with a valid cutting path to a queue in production manager, you will have the possibility to select a cutting device in the workflow tab of the job-properties, and an additional tab is shown to set the cutting properties (sometimes it needs closing the job properties and open it again after selecting the cutter). A cutting device can be pre-selected too in the default job properties.

The separate cutting file is generated as soon as the job is ripped.

The only thing what‘s not so nice: while other RIPs like Versaworks have an animated preview (ant army), Flexi havent.

 

What a shame. Their software is my favorite and my go to daily design program. That alone would make me scratch HP off my list if I were in the market for printers.