|
upFront.eZine |
|
|
a
publication from |
|
|
Issue #569 : : July 22, 2008 |
|
|
In this issue: Oce ColorWave 600 Press Preview - CrystalPoint Toner Pearls
Corel's Designer Technical Suite X4 - Right Hemisphere & Visio
Out of the Inbox and the other regular columns. |
Write the editor. Make him smile! Through Paypal, consider donating $25 in support of upFront.eZine. Or else... We're trendy. We have a Weblog. WorldCAD Access. |
|
|
|
|
Oce ColorWave 600 Press Preview Patrick Chapuis, president of wide format printing division, welcomed the eight of us editors, and introduced us to the Dutch company. Chicago is the North American headquarters for the wide format printing division. Annual worldwide revenues are $4.5 billion. The company operates in 90 countries with a theme of “technology and services for printing professionals.” There are four divisions that make up the company: 1. Document Printing Systems -- office printing, copying, scanning, and faxing. 2. Production Printing Systems -- continuous feed and cut sheet printing. With a 60% market share, your credit card statement was probably printed on a Oce printer. 3. Wide Format Printing Systems -- technical documents, CAD/GIS, display graphics, and imaging supplies; 50% market share. I found that “display graphics” has nothing to do with monitors, but refers to 4'x8' sheets printed for giant banners and outdoor advertisements. 4. Oce Business Services -- document process outsourcing, the newest division.
Oce says it is the only company with color and monochrome in the low-, medium-, and high-volume print markets, and the “only” one selling a large-format flatbed printer with a rollmedia option – for printing on just about anything that can be printed on, flexible and rigid. For scanners, they cooperate with Contex. Color became a big market big ten years ago in Europe, and is just now becoming more popular in USA, so potential market is huge. Oce is noticing a slow slide in the volume (er, square feet) of monochrome printing. Three types of ink are employed for color printing:
Oce is the only printer firm to service customers themselves; others use third parties. This results to a healthy amount of service revenue for the company
CrystalPoint Toner Pearls Penny Holland, director of biz dev, introduced us to the company's newest printer and printing technology -- so new that only 30 have so far been installed in Europe. The drawbacks to inkjet are well-known. There is some feathering or bleed on plain paper; water-based ink is affected by water; needs some drying time after printing. The drawback that irritates me the most is that inkjet is media-dependent: I need to insert different kinds of paper for different kinds of output, such as heavier media for the best prints, paper that is 16x more expensive than plain 20-pound paper. The pros to inkjets are accurate dot registration and clean tech. The toner used by laser printers doesn't have the drawbacks of inkjets, but laser/LED printers emit ozone. When printing in color, four toner cartridges are needed, resulting in registration problems. Ms Holland says the most difficult to print is brown lines, which use all four colors; you might end up with two or three slightly offset lines. Thus Oce developed a hybrid of both technologies: toner pearls. The toner is made of blueberry-size waxy spheres, which are heated at 300F to a gel, and then jetted by eight heads onto the media. The gel crystallizes (fuses) into the media. There is no drying time, and so prints can be handled right away. The ink does not crack when the paper is bent. Oce is working with a university to find other applications, such as impregnating bandages with medicine or anti-bacterials. Oce spends 7% of its revenues on R&D, and its 2000 researchers came up with CrystalPoint toner pearls to solve the problems inherent in inkjet and toner. But it was also to give the company a competitive advantage against HP and its huge patent portfolio in printing processes. (Speaking of R&D, the company is looking into 3D printing.)
Drawbacks The Oce staff looked shocked when I asked about drawbacks. As the day progressed, however, drawbacks did emerge. The printer costs $60-$70,000, but that is affordable if you can generate at least $3000 a month in large-format printing business. The toner pearl cartridges cost $400 each, and you need four for color printing. Each cartridge is the size of a fat hardcover book, and so I can't see the technology migrating to the desktop. Potential customers wonder if they have the volume to justify buying a new machine, when their existing large-format printers are still working. There is resistance to new technology: print shops wonder, will the new technology hold up? Toner pearls are proprietary to Oce, so you can't pick up a generic pack from Staples. The crystallizing process needs absorb into fiber, and so glossy paper and film cannot be printed on. (Newsprint and Tyvec, however, work just fine). It can be used outdoors, being rated six weeks UV-resistant. It prints photographs at good quality, but not high quality. A set of four cartridges print 20,000 sq ft of CAD drawings before one of the cartridges need replacing. In terms that I can understand, that's like printing 29,750 sheets of 8.5x11” paper -- about 12 years worth in my office. Toner pearls have no shelf-life expiry, so this becomes plausible!
Color Wave Printer The ColorWave 600 is the first to use CrystalPoint toner pearls. Oce plans to release higher- and lower-volume models in the future, as well as one that is combined with a scanner. Eventually toner pearls will replace much of their older technology. The “600” designates this to Oce-insiders as a medium-duty printer; target volume is 10K-60K square feet per month. It handles roll-fed media between 11” and 42” wide. The 600 could also refer to its 600dpi resolution, although the resolution appears higher due to lack of wicking. Addressability is 1200dpi. Oce claims near-monochrome speed for its color printing, and 4-6x faster than equivalent HP legacy color machines in print speed, such as HP's 650 and 1050 models. The claim does not include drying time, so overall throughput is even faster. In that case, Oce says one of their 600s could replace five machines and get equivalent throughput. Monochrome and color in one machine is especially desirable for print shops in downtown locations where sq-ft rents are expensive. For print shops, the killer is the amount of ink used. This varies wildly, from very little (as in CAD drawings) to very much (as in color photographs). Print shops can lose on a job when sets of CAD drawings contain rendered images. Oce's SmartClick software counts the number of times toner is squirted at the paper to determine the cost to the operator. It also tracks the width and length of each print job. The operator adds his markup, and charges the customer accordingly. The longest plot made on a ColorWave 600? 42” x 212 feet. - - - Links: [Disclosure: Oce provided airfare, ground transportation, hotel, meals, and some corporate gifts to all attendees.] Corel's Designer Technical Suite X4 Klaus Vossen is a product manager located in Germany, where Corel's Designer Technical is popular -- as well as North America. He talked me through features new to X4, the release number for the version available for download July 16.
Right Hemisphere & Visio The addition of greatest interest to CAD users is Deep Explorations from Right Hemisphere. This lets Corel users open 3D CAD models, prepare them for technical illustrations, and then import them into Designer Technical. RHDP can explode, cross-section, render, animate, add tags, and so on. The images are imported as 2D vectors into Technical Designer, with a link: make changes in RHDP, and the Corel illustration is updated. I found it fascinating VSD files without requiring Visio, because the diagramming software stores data in a parametric spreadsheet-like format that can't be usually be parsed by other software. New in Designer Technical is the ability to read and retain Visio data structures, like stretchy connectors. To help out, Corel has added new diagramming tools, such as adding "halos" to lines that cross. The gaps are visual: connectors can still be relocated. There is more control over the look of dimensions. Dimensions can be toggled between dynamic and non-dynamic, where you can stretch the dimension but the dimension text does not change -- anathema to CAD, but useful in technical diagramming.
More CAD-like Getting back into a more CAD-like environment, you can now specify the dimensions of objects before -- or after -- they are created. AutoCAD hatch patterns are supported. Layers are imported from DWG and DXF files, and Designer Technical can assign layers on a per-page basis. It is easier to create isometric drawings. PowerTrace is updated to do a better job of converting raster images to vector line drawings. Live text means that as you choose fonts, the text in the drawing updates at the same time, letting you preview the change. Import and edit tables from a variety of sources, including Microsoft's new DOCX format. ConceptShare is included, where you send documents from Designer Technical to the ConceptShare.com collaboration Web site for others to view and markup. Price is $999 plus $1,699 for the add-on that imports CAD formats at Catia, SolidWorks, and Pro/Engineer. Upgrade is $499, and 30-day demo is free from coreldraw.com/content/cdtsx4preview.aspx . From the Editor If you find upFront.eZine useful, you could help out by encouraging co-workers and friends to subscribe. I'd like to double the readership this year. Have them send the message "subscribe upfront" to editor@upfrontezine.com . Thank you!
Carlson Software's Sight Survey 2009 simplifies solving coordinate geometry and construction surveying problems. Works with AutoCAD 2002+, MicroStation V8, XM, and PowerDraft, and has IntelliCAD built-in. www.carlsonsw.com/ JTB releases AutoCAD Automation Tools (e25.00) creates multiple drawings automatically from a source drawing or a control file created by Excel templates. www.jtbworld.com/autocad_automation_tools.htm Siemens PLM Software ships v4 of Teamcenter Express software for collaborative product data management. www.siemens.com/plm/teamcenterexpress IMSI/design updates TurboCAD Pro 15 Architectural Edition ($1,395) with new parametric slabs, green materials, bills of material, and improved styles manager and terrain tool. Download the demo from www.turbocad.com/TurboCAD/TurboCAD15/TurboCADPro15ArchitecturalEdition/tabid/700/Default.aspx LMS integrates an interface for the National Instruments LabVIEW Real-Time module into the latest LMS Imagine.Lab AMESim release. www.lmsintl.com Geometric Limited releases of v2.2 GeomCaliper for CATIA V5 and for Pro/ENGINEER with performance improvements. 15-day demos from geomcaliper.geometricglobal.com/ Oasys (software arm of Arup) launches a new version of GSA structural design and analysis software. It performs analysis and design of structural models composed of skeletal frames and two-dimensional finite elements. 30-day demo from www.oasys-software.com/gsa Alibre announces that the beta for Alibre Design v11 is available to all customers on maintenance. The software is due to ship late summer. www.alibre.com/promos/online/v11.asp Aftercad Software start beta signups for its Aftercad Online platform -- view, mark-up, manage, and publish large CAD and GIS data files on the Web without proprietary viewers. Public beta opens August 1. (AfterCAD is now owned by MeggaByte Software.) www.aftercadonline.com And service pack 1 (oops, it's now called "Update 1") fixes about 50 bugs in AutoCAD 2009 and LT. Readme file is here: images.autodesk.com/adsk/files/autocad_2009_and_autocad_lt_2009_update_1.html - - - These news items were posted during the last week at the WorldCAD Access blog < worldcadaccess.typepad.com>:
And at the Gizmos Grabowski < worldcadaccess.typepad.com/gizmos/ > Weblog:
Hardware News nVidia updates its AutoCAD Performance Driver to v17.2.1 (OpenGL) and v17.2.0 (Direct3D). Performance improvements of up to 10x on some tests, when run on a Quadro FX graphics card. OpenGL on XP only. www.nvidia.com/object/AUTOCAD_2009.html
Seminars & Conferences Mid-Continent MicroStation Community is August 26-27 at the Overland Park Conference Center in Overland Park KS USA. Day 1 begins with a keynote from Barbara Day, BrIM Director Americas, Bentley. Register at www.tmcmcmc.org/modules/confreg/
People/Companies on the Move CIMdata publishes a review of SAP's new PLM Roadmap program. No-charge dow nload from www.cimdata.com/publications/complimentary_product_program_reviews.php EDS used to own them, and now is doing business with Seimens PLM Software. EDS Services is working with with Siemens Teamcenter software to create Defense Logistics Solution for the aerospace and defense logistics field.
Market News Catalog Data Solutions reports an 85% Q1/Q208 increase in revenue over the first half of 2007. The company expands content on its free CAD model search engine at www.3DModelSpace.com
WorthWhile Web www.alleyinsider.com/2008/7/monitor110-a-post-mortem
"Smaller PCs Cause Worry for Industry"
Letters to the Editor Re: OpenDGN Not So Open "At first most of the OpenDGN header files dissapeared. The code was convoluted to read byte streams with no mapping to actual structures of V8 elements. Strange I thought. What is the purpose of that? "Then I kind of read between the lines; I am only speculating,
but I bet dollars to doughnuts that Bentley said the OpenDGN code
cannot reveal the file format. So buying the source code license
for $12,000 a year doesn't get you far in deciphering the format."
"My take on this AEC Noir, Bentley Systems + Autodesk. AKA:
Raiders of the lost Ark - movie end climax. Belloque [Bentley] opens
the Ark [Autodesk] of the Covenant: 'It's beautiful'. "Alternately, I think it's a tactical/strategic manoeuvre from Autodesk. They know Bentley Systems is getting massive, and is still private. I do not think that the Bentley family would give away their company so easily. They all enjoy the direct day-to-day engagement with the user community as is evident by their direct response and involvement at the grassroots user level, which is far more than any other major AEC corp would profess. "3x annual revenue puts Bentley around $1.4 Billion + their Bank account = almost $2 billion. This would make it tough for the Autodesk to swallow. The regulators won't like a single AEC desk either. "Perhaps Autodesk knows it wouldn't really be able to take on Bentley's interoperability agenda. They know they can take out the ODA, but not Bentley. So instead of working towards a unified file format for both of them and make it available to the wider AEC community. "Note that I'm just an end user; I have even less in-depth
knowledge or understanding than you or the other commentators have."
"Money is all Autodesk really cares about. They won't even
let a poor guy sell his antiquated AutoCAD R14 on eBay without harassing
him. But it looks like Autodesk is loosing that battle <www.caddit.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5>
And eBay is letting everyone sell their old AutoCADs again!" - - - "Thanks for the good industry covering."
"I enjoy your newsletters and find them very informative."
Spin Doctor of the Moment ""The mouse works fine in the desktop environment,
but for home entertainment or working on a notebook it's over."
Notable Quotable ""There are times when it really helps to have seen
the same kinds of stories develop over and over again, which allows
you a chance to look further down the road and anticipate what might
happen."
Thank You to Our Subscribers & Donators These great people support upFront.eZine through their contributions of $25 (or more). Thank you, guys!
Copyright 2008 by upFront.eZine Publishing, Ltd. All rights reserved worldwide Article reprint fee US$250.0 and up.
All
trademarks belong to their respective holders.
"upFront.eZine," "Talking About CAD," and
"the business of CADg" are trademarks of
upFront.eZinePublishing, Ltd. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|