Focus on Digital Front Ends

An AGFA Counterpoint: Is DFE What We Need?

Many prepress vendors have announced that they are jumping on the DFE bandwagon in response to demand in the marketplace. Agfa feels quite differently about this, as Michael Jahn, PDF evangelist for Agfa, explains.

"The concept of the DFE is much like the concept of adding a clock to a toaster oven. The industry does not need a bunch of black boxes that consume PDF or PostScript, process them into bitmaps and then drive devices that spit out paper, film or plates," Jahn argues. "The industry needs to invest in systems which preserve the data that the file contains—data that is used for archiving, EDI, links, URLs, validation and CIP3 post-processing."