 WinPCSign Pro Review
I guess this is as good a place as any for the review of a Print/Cut software. Its called WinPCSign Pro by a company named Sign Max out of Canada. It retails for roughly $300 US and comes with a ok sized complement of fonts and clipart. It is USB key protected and appears to have a very large library of cutter, printer and Print/cutter drivers.
Ive been attempting to run this software to its intended use, design, print, cut. I will say it does have some decent features for design but the program itself seems very underpowered to use many of them. The user manual is a little less than an average user may need BUT there is an entire bank of ever growing online tutorials on their website. The main issue Ive been battling as of late is using bitmap fills on anything other than text generated by the program. Meaning, if you create a square within the program, it will not add a fill. Now, you can create that same square in say Corel Draw, import it, use the Close Paths command and then add your fill. A little too involved for a program that is supposed to be a design program
There is a nice contour feature thats pretty easy, once you get the hang of it. Click the contour wand icon, a window appears, click the wand on the raster image you wish to have contour cut and adjust the 3 sliders until the contour outline is to your liking. To just import a raster file and drop a contour outline is nice and easy. And the registration mark feature is also easy enough. I would have liked to see it as a tool icon that was placeable but its not that big of a deal having to click on it from the pull down in the upper bar.
One of the lacking features is the zoom. Youre stuck with only 1 of 4 options. You can zoom the page, zoom selected item, zoom all and zoom small. A more flexible zoom feature would make editing nodes and the like so much easier and you will find yourself needing to edit on a close level from time to time with this software.
You do have many of the same features found in other and in some cases, more expensive programs. Just in the case of WPS, they arent as user friendly. Some of the raster editing tools like, filters, Photo cut and Color Separation arent as clean in their finish as Corel's PhotoPaint. Their is an Interpolation feature that works surprisingly well considering the rest of the softwares performance. Just make sure you have a clean copy of the image just in case.
With my purchase there was an offer for a 90 day free membership to their font and clip-art library online. Be careful if you use this for commercial work. There are a ton of copyrighted logos and fonts listed on the site. Nice if youre just messing around and want to cut or print something for the fun of it. Disastrous, if you dont know any better and use it for a paying job ( many are Canadian as well as US company logos)
As I stated, there is an online forum intended for support. Im sure some have received it and if you browse the forum itself, you will see the easier problems solved. I myself had to relist 3 times for one problem I was having due to the post being deleted. You can call and they are happy to sit with you and try any option to work the issues out, but most times it seems this is a paid beta. I have a 5 year old cutter that uses a USB connection, this software wont support it. After hours on the phone with very nice techs, and several driver attempts later, my answer was to buy a parallel card and cable (USB to parallel cable have not worked in most cases)
It does a fine job as an entry level RIP program for my Roland but you find yourself having to do all of your work in something else i.e. CS3 and going back and forth until you have the image just right.
Conclusion: After about 2 months of figuring, fighting and flipping the bird to this software, I wouldnt recommend it. For an extra $200 CoCut has turned out to be the best option for me and Corel CS3. More power and ease of use. This may at some point become the software it claims it can be, but at this time it falls short in too many ways. Hope this helps anyone looking for a less expensive way to enter the Print/Cut world. | 
