A Look at the Latest Enhancements to Canon PRISMAsync Version 6

*This blog was originally posted on PODi Insights by Greg Cholmondeley.

Canon has a new version of their PRISMAsync Production Print Server out and it has some noteworthy enhancements.

Canon’s imagePRESS and VarioPrint series of production digital presses can be driven by PRISMAsync or EFI Fiery digital front ends and the choice largely comes down to personal preference and whether you run a multi-vendor shop. Choosing PRISMAsync, however, provides some unique, Canon-specific capabilities which are unattainable by other means, including:

• Predictive job scheduling and management which enable operators to preemptively load media and toner before presses enter a pause condition
• Built-in impositioning and color editing capabilities
• And its simplified, streamlined color management

Version 6 leverages PRISMAsync’s advantage of understanding the internal workings of Canon presses to deliver three significant improvements:

• Fast and simple color accuracy verification
• Quick and easy G7 calibration and media profiling
• And business intelligence about how presses are being utilized

If you have a color press you are certainly doing color management to keep your output quality accurate and consistent. But, if you’re like most printers, you probably aren’t doing it as often as you should. Calibrating and media profiling take a long time and require a color management expert. Heck, just verifying that your machine is properly calibrated takes so much time that it kills your productivity. Checking the profiles of each and every media on every press is almost unmanageable. Then, you feel like you wasted your time if everything is good and you have to spend even more time calibrating and profiling if it isn’t.

PRISMAsync version 6 addresses this in a few ways.

• First, all the tools are integrated into the digital front end so you don’t need to purchase, install, and learn multiple packages.
• Second, the server knows how the press lays down color so it can make the correct adjustments in a single pass using fewer test patches.
• Third, PRISMAsync allows you to set up media families so that a single profile can be applied to many, similar papers.

The net result of this is that verification, calibration, and profiling doesn’t require color expertise and is considerably faster to perform. A trained operator to do a calibration verification in about a minute and a full G7 calibration in five minutes. This means that you can schedule one of your operators to ensure that your quality levels are where they should be every day instead of only before a major job from a critical client.

PRISMAsync version 6 also contains something new called the PRISMAlytics Dashboard. This is a business intelligence packaged that pulls out proprietary data from deep inside Canon presses and analyzes it. The dashboard indicates how much time each press was producing work, or sitting idle. It breaks down idle time even further to show if it was waiting for a job, waiting for operator input, or waiting for a problem resolution outside the operator’s abilities. This can help explain whether your press productivity is being impacted by technical issues, operator inefficiencies, or by a lack of work due to either insufficient volume or upstream prepress delays.

PRISMAlytics Dashboard even when calibration was performed and how long it took. That is a powerful tool to track whether operators really are performing color management.

It shows this, and other information, as current snapshots of what is going on in the shop today and as historical information which shows volume, click and utilization trends over a specified length of time consolidated by day, week, or month.

I created four videos which go into this in more depth with demonstrations and put them into a PODi Product Briefing. Go to www.podi.org/Canon-PRISMAsync-V6-PODi-Product-Briefing.html to access the briefing and watch the videos which interest you. I’m excited by these new features because I think they will help commercial printers and in-plants consistently deliver the same quality as the demos which sold them on their Canon presses every single day.