Hall 6, stand C23

There will be no half-measures for Caldera as it celebrates its quarter-century at drupa 2016, presenting a range of innovations suited to the forward momentum in ink-jet technology. The renowned French software manufacturer will preview the forthcoming major update to its signature RIP suite, V11, plus a new cloud-based job submission portal and a quality control solution, while demonstrating collaborations with manufacturers across the production spectrum to help print houses capitalise on their investments. 

In line with its established product strategy, 2016 will see Caldera maintain the biennial rhythm of its major releases. Version 11 fully incorporates the latest version of the Adobe PDF Print Engine (APPE), v4, unlocking unlimited spot colour handling, seamless gradients and optimized rendering for users, regardless of their production goals. Innovative features, such as print cluster management and a ‘True Bleed’ pixel cloning option to improve edge-to-edge cutting, will also be on show. 

Caldera has been at the crest of APPE product development since it adopted the print engine, now at the heart of most leading RIP software, in 2009. It is one of a number of visionary partnerships forged by the award-winning developer during its 25 year existence – a period that has seen the one-time start-up grow to become a community of 20,000 users world-wide, supporting five core RIP packages with more than twenty modules available in multiple languages.

This ethos of collaboration has perpetuated throughout 2016 as Caldera has extended its partnerships with both leading manufacturers, including Fujifilm, Durst, swissQprint, HP and Epson, and emerging developers. Platforms from Tecglass, ColorJet, ITI and NoeCha join those from market specialists MTex, d.gen and RTI to make Caldera’s RIP and workflow software the most broadly compatible in the industry while maintaining an accessible, fixed-rate price point for print houses of all sizes.

Over the last twelve months Caldera has addressed the particular demands of various print markets with releases such as TextilePro, for large-scale digital textile production, and Nexio, the software connector for workflow automation in industrial and graphics environments. This year’s drupa will see the presentation of partnerships within the 3D print and additive manufacturing space, including Massivit, creator of its eponymous large-format object fabricator with a 1.2 x 1.5 x 1.8m cabin size. Caldera will also showcase a co-branded product which enables wide-format houses to build three-dimensional interlocking displays from cardboard, resin, polystyrene or other materials with no theoretical limit in the Z axis using standard equipment flat-bed cutters.

This year’s drupa also sees Caldera respond to new opportunities for ink-jet users in the cloud. A new cloud-based job submission portal will star in this development strand, as will a synchronisation module that allows RIP settings to be shared between print environments. This latter solution lets users share values such as ICC profiles, presets, job submission settings and other common elements, promising print houses using multiple RIPs the ability to store and deploy a unified configuration across their production environment.

“Caldera will celebrate its 25th birthday at drupa, representing both a milestone for the company itself but also in the advance of the ink-jet space into new and exciting territory,” explains Frederic Soulier, Chief Technology Officer at Caldera. “Along with our latest major version release we’ll focus on the potential for ink-jet to reach into and disrupt new areas, especially in textile, industrial and 3D printing. Our product development pathway encapsulates the need for cloud-based resources and relies heavily on the many partnerships we’ve established with both major and lesser-known manufacturers around the digital ink-jet area, and we believe that this will provide Caldera users with the tools and vision they require to develop unique, innovative applications in the years to come.”

“Whether this is the cloud drupa, the ink-jet drupa or any other drupa is irrelevant: print, through ink-jet, is finding new landscapes to change and influence,” concludes Joseph Mergui, Chief Executive Officer. “For the last 25 years Caldera has prospected for these landscapes, taken the lie of the land, and established what users, and the industry, need in order to be successful. At drupa 2016 we will show printers of all shapes and sizes how Caldera can be the partner that helps them engineer that success.”