what software is best to work alongside the PC60 please?

[J. Hulme]

quote KAT:

(?) HELP
I’ve just Purchased a used pc60 with signlab 5 software.
All looks fine and working.
my problem is I would like to use it with Illustrator if possible.
I used it through the windows printer driver but it seems a little basic
I heard of the program “Cut Choice”.
can this be used with Illustrator if so How do I get a version as all I can find is the updates.
It was not in the software that came with the printer.
any help would be great
Cheers 😆

Well I’d get shut of signlab 5 on eBay quick.

Rule no1
Flexisign for printing / contour cutting or plotting.

Signlab is good for basic design and cutting vinyl as its easy, ask it to anything else, forget it.

[Robert Lambie]

Hi outline… (If downing a product mate, please be specific on why 🙂 )

I have 5 machines running signlab and never had ONE problem in the last 6-7 years! (not sayion no faults, just none that heve EVER gave me grief)
I have heard problems with E6 but none for v5, rev12.
I am not saying there isn’t any, just saying its damn good software.
Please elaborate on what is good and bad in any replies made… 😀

[J. Hulme]

quote Robert Lambie:

Hi outline… (If downing a product mate, please be specific on why 🙂 )

I have 5 machines running signlab and never had ONE problem in the last 6-7 years! (not sayion no faults, just none that heve EVER gave me grief)
I have heard problems with E6 but none for v5, rev12.
I am not saying there isn’t any, just saying its damn good software.
Please elaborate on what is good and bad in any replies made… 😀

If you’d use Flexisign, you’d know what I’d mean.
Signlab is far too buggy, strange how signlab 5 works better that E6, printing is abysmal, confusing setup, print or otherwise, continually crashing, continually upgrading, continually modular rip-off format of upgrade, flexisign however, sets up immediately to ribbons, no enabling/disabling spots in driver setup, no buggering about waiting 15 minutes for spooling, no adding silly contour cut colours, maybe not it’s been a while.. I forget its indiosyncrasies

In flexi you can use colour mixer and produce 1- 100% of each ribbon or your print CIS bottles manually enabling to specify complete colour flexibility, along with your pallette, this gives an infinate command over colour range, maybe you can on signlab colormaster or whatever it’s called now. But I’d rather not waste my cash trying.

I know where I’ll put my money, Flexisign everytime!

Signlab is my favourite for cutting vinyl, I use it everyday, I like its interface, But when it comes to vectorising and digitalising, zooming to *a* precise node, printing, importing jpegs, .eps, bitmaps, file conversion, using on board adobe filters and photoshop similar facilities
signlab is dead and buried and *in my opinion* with the advantages of flexi, always will be second fiddle.

And there’s more…..

Cadlinks website is attriocious, their customer service / care is zero,
( some of their dealers) are not only incompetent but completely ignorant and misleading about the product they’re selling and seem to want extract as much cash as possible without regard for any loyality or recognition to previous purchases.

So it’s Signlab 7 for me then….
Errrmmmm…..Not if it was free CADlink!

[Robert Lambie]

quote :

If you’d use Flexisign, you’d know what I’d mean.
Signlab is far too buggy, strange how signlab 5 works better that E6, printing is abysmal, confusing setup, print or otherwise, continually crashing, continually upgrading, continually modular rip-off format of upgrade, flexisign however, sets up immediately to ribbons, no enabling/disabling spots in driver setup, no buggering about waiting 15 minutes for spooling, no adding silly contour cut colours, maybe not it’s been a while.. I forget its indiosyncrasies

are we talking 5 or 6? if 6 its irrelavant to the post mate.

quote :

In flexi you can use colour mixer and produce 1- 100% of each ribbon or your print CIS bottles manually enabling to specify complete colour flexibility, along with your pallette, this gives an infinate command over colour range, maybe you can on signlab colormaster or whatever it’s called now. But I’d rather not waste my cash trying.

if you can in colour master then you can. for £1000 cheaper than flexi you may get this. full blown signlab is lets say £2000 but flexi £3000
ide really hope a big differences in software for this type of cash. not just little extra tweaks here and there…
i am not the man to compare on printing capabilities of signlab at all mate. what i do know is that its a damn good vinyl cutting/artwork creating package. (our company would not invest £10000 in it, if it wasnt) thats just my own opinion though. but i am really glad you chose to elaborate on your last post. helps others decide for themself reading these replies. thank you 😀

[Gordon Forbes]

Well I am using Signlab V6.1 revision 16 and I must say whats all the bugs etc etc.
When printing to a PC600 I dont have problems only with colour matching but that seems common with all programs as you never get what you see on screen.

Runs a D60 with no probs even prints to 1290.

I can run really big files through Signlab without a noticable degradation in speed, big bitmaps slow it down but then you can just change the settings.

Updated faultlessly to no probs

As to the post cant you import from Illustrator save as .eps or .ai and it should come in.

Goop

[David Evans]

Hello,

This is my first post, my name is David Evans and I work for Cadlink on the development side. I am in charge of all Signlabs printing products.

I am based in the UK and work from my home in London, but spend about 3-4 months a year in Canada and the US.

While I agree that Signlab has had some issues with printing in the past, the last two major revisions Signlab 6.1 and Signlab 7 have been focused on printing and has made major improvements in this area.

Signlab 6.1 introduced the thermal module, which was a series of features specifically for thermal devices such as the Roland and Gerber devices. Signlab 7 is a complete overhaul of the printing sub system and even more thermal features.

There is now no other software out there on the planet that even begins to compare with Signlab when it comes to driving thermal devices.

Flexi doesn’t even come up to Omega levels of thermal support and Signlab goes a lot further than Omega.

I know you are all thinking, well you are going to say that, as you are the product manager. But I give you one example, it was reported that Signlab cant import illustrator (well it can), but no import filter is 100% not Signlab, not Corel and not Flexi. But Signlab has a feature not found in Flexi that gives us a much higher reliability of printing than Flexi, save as EPS and then use the Link feature. This will not import the Illustrator, but instead hold a pointer to the EPS that will eventually be printed (the PostScript RIP can interpret reliably). You can do the same from Corel, Quark or any application that can save EPS files. If these EPS files contain designs that where created with spot colours you can map these to a spot cartridge / foil on your thermal printer, you can even map it to what we call a duotone colour, this is a colour made up of a combination of two spots, lets say you are trying to match British racing green, you don’t have a ribbon that matches this colour, but 100% spot green and 50% cyan on top gives you a match. You create this colour in you palette. Then a design in Illustrator or Corel that has been created using a spot colour British racing green with blends, graduations tints etc. can just be linked and the British racing green is mapped to the duotone created in Signlab and the whole thing can be printed, all graduations, blends and tints will be recreated automatically using the two spots keeping the relative % even.

You cant do this in Flexi, nor with the Roland driver, you can only do this with Signlab and this is just one of many unique features. There are loads more from comprehensive trapping, perforated Windows, InRIP priming, multitone bitmaps, PhotoShop channel support.

Anyone who wants a demonstration of Signlab support for thermal devices, drop me a line mod-edit and I will be happy to organise one for you.

We can even do on-line demonstrations where using your browser you can see my screen and I can talk it through with you on the phone.

Best regards

-David
Cadlink

[Karl.Tipping]

HI
glad to see so many reply’s to my thread, but there seems to be a software battle going on.
We all have our favourite software as I do I still like advantage 6.2 for basic digitising Illustrator for designing
photoshop for image work corel for file conversions I could go on & on
however my question was about cutting problems when printing more then 2 spot colours through
the windows driver on XP or going through signlab.
If anyone could help me on this subject I would appreciate it
many thanks