As I've traveled for the last few weeks, I got a few blog posts that I wanted to post to follow-up on some of the questions / comments from some of you. The focus of this entry is around the new partnership Corel announced at ISS in Long Beach, CA with Wilcom, the leading developer of embroidery and decoration technology. As mentioned in my previous blog entry, we also introduced a brand new product called "Wilcom DecoStudio© e1, a CorelDRAW product" in North America at the ISS show.

As many of you know, we previously had products called "Corel DRAWings" and "Corel DRAWings Pro" which combined CorelDRAW Graphics Suite with a third-party technology to provide a dedicated solution for the embroidery market around the CorelDRAW graphics engine. We at Corel consider DecoStudio to be the next evolution of embroidery and multi-decoration software as it contains powerful new technology and greatly increased quality and speed.

One of the most important aspect when it comes to the evolution of our product offering is always around the quality of the output and the ease of getting there. Wilcom is known for its fantastic quality and optimized digitizing as well as its lettering.  And because an image is worth a 1000 words, here is the result created with DecoStudio, the conversion from the vector graphic to a stitch file was done automatically. We did tests with other solutions on the market and the quality, stitch count and color change is a lot smaller with DecoStudio in case you wonder.

For those of you who are already Corel DRAWings / Corel DRAWings Pro customers, Wilcom and Corel are offering a special trade-in price at 50% off the full price. DecoStudio e1 comes with CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X3, but for a limited time, when you purchase it, you will be eligible for an upgrade to the next version of DecoStudio that will be built around CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4 for a nominal price (cost of materials + shipping). If you take advantage of the trade-in from Corel DRAWings, you are also eligible to this offer at the condition that your return your hardware key.

I also wanted to all let you know that the recently announced DRAWings® 4 product from DRAWstitch has no connection with Corel and does not include the CorelDRAW Graphics Suite as its graphics engine.

For those outside of North America, we will have more details in the coming months, including localized versions. Stay tuned. And for more informations about DecoStudio, please visit www.corel.com/decostudio or www.wilcom.com.au.

Oh, yes, I still haven't been able to convince my better half to get an embroidery machine at home... still working on it

Update - February 3, 2008: Digital Art Solutions has more information about DecoStudio as well as a video showing it in more details. 

Update - February 22, 2008: I just posted a new blog post that actually includes the DST files of the photo above.