APT announces inaugural awards winners

The Association for Print Technologies (APTech) has named the winners of its inaugural Red Hot Technology Vanguard Awards. Nine awards have been given - five Breakthrough Awards, two Collaboration Awards and two and Pioneer Awards.

“The Vanguard Award winners are all potential game-changers that open new business opportunities and new markets,” explained Julie Shaffer, associate vice president, programme and community development, Association for Print Technologies. “We base our selections on industry impact, rather than by product category, so the programme is less a competitive faceoff and more about what these products mean to the industry as a whole.” Breakthrough Award winners: Color-Logic Touch7 Neon Suite from Color-Logic. The Touch 7 Neon Suite provides tools enabling designers and printers to use the common Adobe CC platform for easily adding neon colors to an original image for printing on neon-capable analogue and digital presses. It automates the process of manually creating separations for extended gamut printing. Pitstop Pro 2018 from Enfocus. The 2018 version of 20-plus-year-old Pitstop Pro pre-flighting software offers a capability to capture and display user analytics that can improve operations. It also has vector editing tools, a method to clean files and hard crop extraneous line art, a visualiser to monitor each step in an action list, and has better Pantone colour functionality. Tilia Phoenix 7.0 from Tilia Labs. Tilia Phoenix 7.0 is an imposition, planning and estimating automation solution that integrates with workflow and MIS systems to provide single-source management of imposition, ganging and nesting for all print and post-print processes on digital and conventional sheetfed and roll-fed printers. Ultimate Impostrip 2019 from Ultimate TechnoGraphics. With Ultimate Impostrip 2019 artificial intelligence comes to page imposition enabling automatic selection of best-fit layouts based on existing templates or a specific subset of templates - or by creating optimal layouts without the use of templates. Ricoh Pro VC70000 from Ricoh. The VC70000 is a high-speed, colour continuous-feed inkjet press that runs at up to 130,000 A4/letter impressions per hour at 1200 x1200dpi on coated and uncoated papers. Collaboration Awards winners: ChromaChecker Connectivity to HP Indigo Color Beat. The new connectivity between the cloud-based colour-conformance platform, Chromachecker, and the HP Indigo colour monitoring tool, Color Beat, provides real-time feedback on whether print jobs are meeting expectations, for analysis by authorised personnel in any location. Avanti Slingshot Integration with BCC Mail Manager. The integration of BCC Mail Manager, an end-to-end mail processing management software, with the Avanti Slingshot print MIS platform has resulted in an end-to-end automated direct mail management solution that streamlines direct mail production workflow. Pioneer Awards winners: AccuEngage from AccuZip. A service that assists mailers and marketers in creating campaigns using the USPS technology Informed Delivery, which provides consumers with digital previews of their household mail. Iridesse production press with Colour FLX Technology, Xerox. This xerographic digital press uses Colour FLX Technology to print as many as six colours in-line, at its 120ppm rated speed, including underlays or overlays of metallic gold, metallic silver or clear, individually or mixed, to create iridescent effects in a single pass.