Xitron celebrates 40 years of pre-press independence

Print Solutions

Xitron is celebrating 40 years as a provider of pre-press hardware and software to the printing industry. Xitron’s first products were ‘blue box’ interfaces between newspaper editorial systems and high speed laser imagesetters, first brought to market in 1977.

‘Back then, our job was to provide technological independence to newspapers, allowing them to choose their editorial systems separately from their output systems,’ said Karen Crews, Ppresident of Xitron. ‘As we mark our 40th year in the print industry, we continue to develop RIPs, workflow software, and hardware interfaces for commercial, newspaper, inplant, flexo, screen printing, and high speed digital output devices without binding our customers to any single vendor.’

Xitron’s business model has allowed it to place nearly 35,000 RIPs and over 20,000 CTP and imagesetter interfaces in printing companies on every continent.

‘This achievement really speaks to Xitron’s commitment of independence when it comes to a user’s pre-press choices,’ said Gary Fry, CEO of Global Graphics, authors of the Harlequin RIP. ‘Xitron has been a development partner since 1992, and, coincidentally, our anniversary with Xitron is a milestone in and of itself.’

Several new products that build on Xitron’s commercial catalogue are slated for release. Included in the line up are Raster Blaster 4.0, which is an intelligent TIFF catcher for all supported CTP devices; B3, a new network based interface that doesn’t require a computer platform; and a very economical USB/SCSI interface for legacy Fujifilm platesetters that (until now) could not be upgraded beyond Windows XP operating systems.

An upgrade to Xitron’s Adobe PDF Print Engine (APPE) based Sierra workflow is also planned, in cooperation with Adobe development partner, FFEI Ltd.

‘Xitron and FFEI have a relationship that began in 1999 with the Xenith workflow,’ said Andy Cook, managing director of FFEI. ‘We have continued to work together through the introduction of Sierra using the Mercury RIP architecture introduced in APPE 3, with which Xitron has significantly impacted the high end workflow market in the US.’

While continuing this successful approach of delivering alternative RIP and interface strategies to the commercial market, recent innovation in print technology has required the company to keep one eye beyond traditional printing. This has fostered the development of colour matching workflow software designed specifically for the needs of high speed inkjet press manufacturers around the world.

‘Staying relevant in a market whose technology moves as quickly as ours is not easy,’ said Len Lauer, president and CEO of Xitron’s inkjet technology partner Memjet. ‘And yet, here it is, developing remarkable colour RIP and workflow software for over half of Memjet’s OEMs. We are looking forward to sustained expansion of this market with Xitron.’

‘This is a very exciting time for Xitron and I have to thank our worldwide dealer organisation and OEM customers for their contributions,’ said Karen. ‘While being firmly entrenched in the traditional print landscape, we also have clear vision of the technological future of our products. Forty years of development have provided us with an excellent foundation to move forward with this industry.’

Driving CTP devices from Agfa, ECRM, Creo, Kodak, Presstek, Heidelberg, Fuji, and Screen, Xitron helps customers who want to maximise their investments by extending the life of their pre-press systems.