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Omega and new prices from Spandex
HOW FRUSTRATING IS OMEGA, I have produced some quite complex images (in Illustrator) and then tried to duplicate them in Omega for printing, suffice to say I am appalled by it, clunky and slow, anyone else had this problem.
Had a call today from Spandex to apologise for the lack of a price list since March (I’d given up anyway) and to be offered a special price of £60 for 75m black or white foils. I had to tell them that I’m sticking with printone who have excellent customer service and never let you down, I even had an apology about their poor customer support.
Sorry guys printone for me, why look anywhere else.
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16 Replies
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I have been dissappointed with spandex for some time, their service really went downhill. They used to be the best, and I used them for quite a few years, till they started having service problems.
BUT… I do believe they are seriously trying to rectify their previous mistakes. Time will tell though.Peter
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we used to use omega when we first got the gerber but really couldn’t get on with it, slow old fashioned not good we do it all with sign lab now
Lynn
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Hi Peter, I hope that they are getting their act together because the hardware is amazing and as I’ve said in prevous posts the chap who sold me the kit was outstanding, I would like to buy certain consumables from them but feel that they have quite a bit of ground to make up at the moment.
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Its interesting to hear that, I think very poorly of Spandex over here too….
Never return my calls and have a general "I dont give a crap about you unless your a 40k a month client" attitude.
The weird thing is, they have most of the products i prefer to use, if they picked up their game on service/pricing, im pretty sure we would quickly become a pretty large client for them…… -
I have to say that I’m getting more out of Spandex now than I have done for a few years, things are definately changing.
As for Omega, well if you have the latest release, it’s pretty powerful, fast and accurate. I do alot of my vector work in Omega then send it over to illustrator because I find it quicker.
What you have to remember is that if you are out putting to an edge, you should be using software designed to do it. Drawing stuff up in Illustrator then sending over to Omega seems a long way around the houses?
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Hi Paul, not if you’ve been using illustrator and freehand for the last 15 years, we have the latest release of Omega, just continues to fall short of professional vector packages, okay for some things.
Cheers -
Jason, what are you doing in illustrator that you can’t do in omega?
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Hi Paul, I can produce the work in Omega, but I find it lacks the obvious tools and as mentioned earlier its – ‘clunky’. I am frustrated that having paid good money for it, it doesn’t do what it says on the tin, because after all vector images are probably the least memory intesive files you can use especially compared to psd files. I find it unbelievable that you have to wait so long if you view a filled file and heaven forbid if you try and duplicate this 10 times, whereas I can generate the work efficently and effectively using either freehand or illustrator (who use universal tools and palettes) in full colour and double check my vector drop shadows etc before importing in to Omega to what in my eyes is essentially a very poor DTP piece of software.
I could produce the work as a jpeg but I need to use spot colours as well as increasing the size of the artwork for my clients.
I notice quite a few people have switched to signlab, but I am thinking about buying the illustrator plug in for my Mac instead and throwing the PC in the bin, seems to get more tempting every day.
I would be interested though in any Omega tips and tricks to overcome the above.Cheers
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Jason, not sure what the cause of your problem is, as i don’t have any of those issues with omega, in fact, i find it much quicker than illustrator for this type of work.
omega on my pc is quick, and really easy to edit, especially for edge work, i wouldn’t even contemplate using something else for that.I suppose you may be quicker in illustrator if you’re used to it, then again you have to remember that omega is not a package intended to rival illustrator or corel, they are much more powerful of course.
Omega is a obviously very specific in what it does, but it does do it well (for me at least)! -
Thanks Paul, some of my individual files are made up of about 10,000 individual pieces and when duplicated I can easily output 150,000 plus parts on a small run, it doesn’t seem to like it, if Omega doesn’t crash and I can push it through to plot, then the plot facility will not respond. I am using a powerful laptop which is fully loaded. I just think that I am expecting to much from it, no problems with the edge outputting provided the file gets through.
I have to admit though I had been asked to produce a piece of work with intricate fading and in all fairness I was able to produce the right effect using Omega for the edge, could not have done it in photoshop, but again took quite a while to re-draw, never mind.
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ahh, now i see your problem! these are not your average type of jobs really. I think i would try to rasterize that, but i think you said you tried that already?
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I agree with Jason on every point. Any one who as only ever used Omega thinks it is great, but anybody who has used illustrator since v88 and 1 will find it hard work.
I struggle to add or delete a point some days!!!. And the number of click etc just to weld two things together drives me crazy, the person who designed the menu layouts and the icons has never had to use the program for any length of time.
Everthing seems to ars e about ti t for no good reason. Just my tuppenth worth. !!
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quote Tim Shaw:I agree with Jason on every point. Any one who as only ever used Omega thinks it is great, but anybody who has used illustrator since v88 and 1 will find it hard work.
I struggle to add or delete a point some days!!!. And the number of click etc just to weld two things together drives me crazy, the person who designed the menu layouts and the icons has never had to use the program for any length of time.
Everthing seems to ars e about ti t for no good reason. Just my tuppenth worth. !!
Hmm…well i use mostly illustrator, coreldraw and photoshop and obviously omega, but i would say from some of these comments it comes down more to what you’re most familiar with.
It also depends what your output is
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It would be most helpful when mentioning software that we all mention the version we are using. I’d love to jump in and help but since my real job is programming and not TechSupport it drives me nuts to ping-pong general info before I can get enough info to help. Omega 2.50 (now 2.51) has a lot of features that users have been asking for over the years. As for Spandex …
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quote Jason Davies:I could produce the work as a jpeg but I need to use spot colours as well as increasing the size of the artwork for my clients.
I notice quite a few people have switched to signlab, but I am thinking about buying the illustrator plug in for my Mac instead and throwing the PC in the bin, seems to get more tempting every day.
I would be interested though in any Omega tips and tricks to overcome the above.Hi Jason,
On the CADlink InfoSource forums, we recently had comment from a fellow that tried the new Boot Camp that allows you to run Windows XP under Mac OS X. Perhaps this would give you more flexibility with your setup? You can ask irie about any challenges he had in setting up Boot Camp, though I understand that the install is pretty painless.
quote irie:I hav gotten 7.1 to work on a Mac Pro under Boot Camp
http://www.cadlink.com/support_train/fo … .php?t=444Cheers,
Rod
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Thanks Rod.
Cheers
Jason
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