Market opens up for ApogeeX

With the pending introduction of ApogeeX – Agfa's new PDF workflow tool – the company sees two very distinct market opportunities in the months ahead.


"Agfa ApogeeX is the most automated, easy-to-use workflow solution on the market," says Garry Muratore, Agfa's Oceania Marketing Manager (pictured). Based on PDF, JDF and Digital Film it puts more control and advanced capabilities at your fingertips."
"ApogeeX brings together a wide range of sophisticated features in one application, including job management, advanced job tickets, PDF trapping, enhanced connectivity, web approval of pages and flats, and much more. With ApogeeX, prepress groups, commercial printers, and packaging printers can complete more jobs in less time, raising profitability.

"Agfa has traditionally provided turnkey solutions, meaning we provide a workflow, CTP (or CTF) engine and proofing all developed, manufactured and supplied by us. Nothing will change in this regard, but we also see a secondary opportunity in existing sites utilising non-Agfa equipment and workflows.

"Our systems integration team have the products and the resources to integrate exiting workflow and/or output devices into the Agfa production world.

"For example a customer could have a lot of money invested in a workflow, but want to take advantage of Agfa's Sublima Screening on an Agfa CTP engine, here our systems integration team would undertake a production audit (effectively a consultation process) and provide an effective solution." says Muratore.

"Probably what will be more typical is a customer wanting to utilise existing output devices but update to a more modern and productive workflow architecture such as Apogee X can provide. Here we would use products like Apogee Power Importer and Apogee PDF RIP's to provide standard industry interchange files between devices.

"I see great opportunities to work with our new partners at CPI to be able to offer the installed Fuji base a state of the art workflow such as ApogeeX," said Muratore.

Apogee Power Importer

Apogee Power Importer automatically detects and imports a wide variety of file formats and converts them to high-resolution PDF files for seamless integration into the Apogee workflow. It uses Agfa's award-winning Agfa Balanced Screening (ABC) screening technology to create screened PDF or PS files on the fly. And it uses ICC-based colour management to generate colour-accurate soft proofs of the converted files, including user-defined spot colors.

Apogee Power Importer also imports and converts copydot files for output to Agfa Computer-to-Film and Computer-to-Plate output devices. It provides optimum performance with either a single or dual processorplatform.

Apogee Power Converter

Apogee Power Converter offers all the same powerful features of Apogee Power Importer with the addition of hard-copy proofing. It outputs native files directly on a printer/proofer for imposition and content proofing, and generates PS and PDF files for contract proofing on the Agfa Sherpa digital proofing system.

Apogee Power Converter also generates TIFF 6 files for the Apogee PrintDrive output manager via OpenConnect. This enables imaging directly to a CTF or CTP device or a proofing system.

Import formats for Apogee Power Importer and Apogee Power Converter:

• SCITEX: nCT/nLW, CT/LW, Handshake


• TIFF: RGB, CMYK, GRAY, screened files (1 bit)


• TIFF/IT-P1 from Scitex, Barco, Artquest, Shira, Harlequin, Heidelberg


• DELTA: List, Document, Export

For high-resolution output: all Agfa CTF/CTP output resolutions.

TIFF/IT Generator Option

The TIFF/IT Generator is an optional component of the Apogee Power Converter. It converts composite or separated PostScript and PDF files, as well as EPS, DCS1, DCS2 files, to TIFF/IT P1 format. This makes exchanging final files (advertisements or complete pages) with non PDF or PS environments fast and easy.