Printing for consumers has been on my mind this week, in particular what a minefield it has the potential to be.

First I visited Precision Printing in Barking which is currently on the midst of its busiest period producing printed photo products. Sensibly it realised that developing a system that could handle 25,000 orders a day was enough of a challenge, even for a clued up business and technology savvy printer like itself, so has gone down the route of being a trade supplier and left the stuff that’s out of its comfort zone - consumer marketing and a consumer e-commerce website - to its clients, who it would be fair to say would have an equally steep learning curve to get to grips with production. This makes it a great partnership that plays to everyone’s strengths.

Secondly, I got a call from Derric Landor, whose Phototex digitally printable repositionable wallpaper was featured on UK primetime TV show Channel Five's Gadget Show.

What a marketing coup.

Exposure to hundreds of thousands, if not a couple of million, of potential customers showing your product in a positive light. And with the TV company's website having that segment of that show easily accessible for a year a gift that keeps on giving. Or should do.

Unfortunately one of the firms that Five lists on its website as being able to produce digital wallpaper (although it’s worth adding it isn’t using Landor’s special substrate, which he argues is the key to ease of use and long life) falls down woefully on customer experience. A call at the end of standard business hours elicited a response that was terse and dismissive, from someone who didn't even know the programme had been aired, despite being happy to use the Gadget Show logo on its homepage.
If I was after ordering several hundred pounds worth of bespoke print for my home, I'd expect to speak to a friendly and knowledgeable person in my own time in the evening. Instead the response was as cold as last week’s weather, making me feel like it was a terrible imposition to be interested in their business.

Unfortunately the example above where a printer has reached out directly to the customer highlights our sector's naïveté when it comes to dealing with consumers. Precision, despite being a textbook and award winning example of customer service and marketing in the B2B market, was smart enough to realise when it came to dealing with consumers it needed to work with experts.

Hopefully the next time print gets a spot in the limelight the firms that feature will do as a favour and be a bit more customer-focused.

Hats off to Fespa for getting stuck into a dialogue with ad agencies and the wider creative community at the Eurobest conference next month.

The organisation’s twofold aim of showing creatives what is possible with print and also taking on board what it is they want to achieve so it can help its printer members to develop better offerings for them is laudable.

One of the things that surprises me whenever I talk to the creative community is just how much they love and value print, and yet, often as not, aren’t au fait with all that is possible. It’s not just the latest developments such as variable data that they aren’t aware of, often it’s also ways production techniques, materials and substrates can add impact and appeal.

There’s also a much more mundane issue that every printer needs to address, and that’s helping their clients get the most out of the tools they use to design for print.

At last week’s PrintWeek webcast Success in practice: Workflow, the biggest issue to arise was about making it easier for designers to work with their printers. Although it was agreed that technology driven solutions such as web-to-print and JDF job ticketing were all agreed to help make things easier, the thing that stood out as the most important way to improve things for both sides was education. Spending time showing designers how to make and submit decent files and pointing them in the direction of the online guides available from the likes of the Ghent Workgroup is an easy win for everyone.

While it may not be as exciting as showing the creative heights that can be scaled, helping clients in the foothills of file preparation makes it easier to print, and that’s as important a part of making print an appealing part of the media mix.

Greenpeace recently scored itself a publicity coup by hijacking a paper industry awards ceremony to present controversial paper and forestry firm APP with a "Golden Chainsaw" award.

The story has got our forum buzzing, as can be seen in the message trail underneath the story. One poster "Oscar" accused PrintWeek of bias and posted a link to a report that he claimed redressed the (im)balance. His point was picked up by "Stanley Dingtype", who asked whether the act of reporting this event was itself biased. The straight answer to that is no, as our news editor Simon Nias adds on the thread.

However, "Stanley" then goes on: "I think that occasionally a report has to contain some 'balancing' opinion to remain unbiased, especially when published in a paper that represents the interests of the victim (ie our Paper Industry)."

To refer to the victim of Greenpeace’s activity as “our paper industry” is taking things a little too far. It singled out one controversial organisation, APP. By the same token anyone who criticised any one of a myriad of controversial print companies on these forums (as happens on an almost daily basis) could be accused of “attacking the print industry”.

The environment is a big issue for print and paper – allegations of bad practice can taint the whole sector, affecting the livelihoods of hundreds in the supply chain. This is one reason why PrintWeek strives very hard to be unbiased, fair and accurate. That includes looking beneath the surface of what we are told, regardless of the source or subject matter.

I too was intrigued by Oscar’s post and the press release he references http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20101117005558/en.

Having read his comment I wanted to find out more about Mr Moore as I was unfamiliar with him. I have since downloaded the full report he published http://www.scribd.com/asiapulppaper regarding his trip to Indonesia. It has raised some additional questions, not least being why it has been uploaded to Scribd by APP rather than by Mr Moore or his organisation Greenspirit Strategies http://www.greenspirit.com?

I also carried out a brief search on his background and found this reference http://www.powerbase.info/index.php?title=Greenspirit_Strategies to him and Greeenspirit Strategies on a site called Powerbase http://www.powerbase.info/index.php?title=Main_Page which keeps a list of PR firms and lobbyists. I cannot speak for the veracity of the information on this site; however, the more one looks into the claims and counterclaims concerning APP, the more convuluted the story becomes.

Unfortunately, I have no easy answer as yet as to who the heroes and villains are. However, APP is in the firing line as far as Greenpeace is concerned and regardless of PrintWeek’s coverage, this kind of publicity stunt by the NGO will – rightly or wrongly – continue until APP satisfies its critics that it is beyond reproach.

Last week I wrote about the uptake of digital for higher-volume wide-format print apps and how the price of ink was now the biggest barrier to the process’ further encroachment on the analogue world of screen and litho Cost is now the only constraint for large-format digital.

So when Agfa went big on the low ink consumption of its latest wide-format machines when it unveiled its offerings for SGIA. First off, it reminded me that this wasn’t the first time Agfa’s inkjet vice president had made these claims, he said the same thing at Fespa Digital in Amsterdam last year but it seems to be a claim that has lain uncontested or commented on.

Last week Barham added more detail. Saying that the M-Press Tiger and the new Jeti 3020 Titan sipped ink in comparison with rival high-end offerings. The average coverage per litre was 150sqm, and Barham said that as a result these machines ink consumption was “at least 50% reduced compared to HP’s FB7500”. Of course, there’s no point bragging about low ink consumption if you then claw back the cost through charging more per litre so you end up with the same sort figure for ink cost per square metre. However Barham says that “everyone is competitive on ink price”, which suggests that Agfa users may have a genuine advantage in this respect.

Agfa says that in part that is due to its use of greyscale print heads, and in particular small droplet sizes (the smallest is 8picolitre) to produce very thin ink films on the substrate, compared to rivals using 30 or 42pl droplets. So this may be a short lived advantage until greyscale heads become the norm and everyone has the same capability and lower ink consumption.

All this sort of stuff is just the sort of claim and counterclaim (just like those for quality and productivity figures) where independent testing would prove handy to help printers to establish what is hype and what is reality.

Regardless of the detail, it’s hard to ignore any claim that cuts up to 50% of ink costs, if those costs are the biggest restraint on the increased adoption

Large-format digital is growing up at last. In fact it could be said to be better than litho or screen in most instances. This week we have two stories on Inca Onset customers installing multiple machines to meet customer demand 

Both Augustus Martin and Imprint are British and both are firms with a pioneering attitude to digital. What is significant though is they both report that the work that their Onsets were needed for isn’t new digital work; it’s new to digital work, which was previously produced using screenprint or litho. The long awaited tipping point from analogue to digital may finally be upon us.

Augustus Martin joint managing director Lascelle Barrow even said that digital was better than screen print and litho because it’s quicker to set-up, easier to colour manage and perhaps most importantly produces little or no make ready waste.

When a litho job, if it’s a short run, may need more makeready sheets than the actual run length it’s pretty obvious that something is amiss and the process is far from perfect. But if digital is so good why aren’t these stories accompanied by the news that Augustus Martin and Imprint are jettisoning their screen and litho print lines at the same time as adding additional digital firepower?

It’s the economy stupid. Or more accurately the economics. Specifically it’s the price of digital ink. The market has hit a point when the biggest barrier to digital’s wider adoption isn’t about what it can or can’t do; it’s purely down to cost. The market may have hit an impasse. Ink prices won’t fall until volumes rise, and volumes won’t rise until ink prices fall.

What will be worth watching is how this scenario plays out. Is it a question of the chicken and the egg, or is it a game of chicken between printers and ink suppliers, where who wins determines the pace of the next wave of print’s digitisation?

Large-format print is at the heart of a battle between the great and the good of the art world and the Italian authorities over the use of advertising hoardings in Venice.
A letter from Venice in Peril to Italian minister of culture Sandro Bondi has signatories that read like a who’s who of the creative great and good from across the worlds of art and architecture inc;uding architect Lord Foster and Victoria and Albert museum director Mark Jones.

The letter states that 10 years ago Venice was without such advertisements, and that their scale dwarfs the fine detail and proportions of the buildings around them. It also complains that as they are illuminated at night and as such are the hardest and brightest lights in town by far.

My initial reaction to the letter was to assume the advertising was to some extent paying for the restoration of the building beneath, and as such a good thing.

The letter answers that by stating that “after the great flood of 1966, when the city was in a much worse state and Italy a less rich country, no one contemplated using this method to raise funds”.

Of course, that was 40 years ago when the printing technology and possibly the substrates weren’t available to make such an option feasible.

Now we have the technology the issue is should we use it. Yes the ads are intrusive, if they weren’t they wouldn’t be doing their job. Are they too intrusive? Possibly, and some compromise is necessary.

However, it can be argued that it’s preferable to have a short-term hoarding that contributes to the upkeep of the building behind it rather than a ruin slowly sinking into the lagoon. Venice was built on commerce, isn’t it apt that advertising, the engine of  our consumer society, is being used to rebuild it?

Photos for the blind sounds like an oxymoron, surely anyone who can’t see will not be able to interpret painting with light.

However, thanks to the innovative use of digital print by photographer Juan Torre and Estudios Durero, an exhibition of images to be touched is being held by the Spanish national association of the blind ONCE in Madrid.

For the blind and partially sighted the use of touch as an alternative to sight is a familiar concept through the use of Braille for text-based work. This project extends that further and uses that same sense of touch used to read words to read pictures. It’s a fascinating idea, and one I’d love to have a chance to go and visit – I would say see, but I, ahem, feel, that in this instance it’s as important to touch the works too.

It’s obvious a lot of skill has gone into the selection of the type of images, their preparation and the choice of substrate and printing process to bring the most out of the images.

Has anything similar has been attempted before? The application of textured coatings that can be read by the fingertips would be an ideal application for screen print. But, maybe the steps to build up a multiple layers of texture from the original photograph would be too complicated and impractical using analogue rather than digital techniques.

Texture is nothing new in the visual arts, it’s long been integral to oil painting for instance, and of course sculpture, but maybe digital print offers a new era where the reproduction of visual art doesn’t stop at the image and extends to the texture too. You’d never expect a gallery to allow anyone up close to touch originals, but if digital printing, especially the emerging 3D processes, offers a way to allow a reproduction of the tactile nature of art it opens up new avenues of reproduction and interpretation of existing work and new forms of expression.

A further twist on the project’s super-sensory nature is the choice of subject matter, music and musicians, an art form already accessible to both the blind and the sighted. Truly a super synaesthetic synthesis.

By coincidence the story came to my attention in the same week that I read an article in September issue of of Wired magazine's UK edition about the race to develop implantable retinal prostheses to return some sight to people unfortunate enough to have lost theirs’. Compared to the huge challenges, cost and the current restrictions – monochrome only and low resolution – of the high tech option, printed pictures to be touched are a more elegant, affordable and inclusive way of extending the realm of the senses for the blind and partially sighted.

From PrintWeek

Last week BP’s London operations were brought to an abrupt halt and wide-format print played an important part.

NGO Greenpeace was behind the demonstration that turned off the pumps at over 30 BP branded filling stations.

But what part did wide-format print play?

Look at the footage and there were some sophisticated examples of print on show that did an effective job of hijacking BP’s branding and replacing it with something Greenpeace believed was more apt. These weren’t naïve broad brush daubings onto an old sheet, but professional looking and colour-matched graphics, including some very neat “socks” that slipped over the top of the main filling station signs.

In a neat twist, Greenpeace is wary of anyone using its own brand to promote or in any way endorse themselves, so kept tight-lipped about its printer. Mind you, would you be too keen to woo a corporate with a case study based on helping protestors to hijack one of their peers? However, whoever these pimpernels of wide-format graphics are maybe they’ve discovered the ultimate niche, the need for discretion should hopefully ensure a decent price and a lack of competitors banging on the door to get the job.

Nor was BP alone having its brand banjaxed. On the very night that the Barclays Bank sponsored “Boris’ bikes” took to the streets of London someone had printed and applied some very professional looking alternative printed and cut vinyl to the rear mudguards that drastically altered the messaging.

Fine art digital printing is dominating our wide-format headlines this week, at two ends of the scale.

On one hand there is the news of the demise of The Art Group, a huge provider of fine art digital prints, with a list that reads like a who’s who of the high street and the art gallery.

It’s hard to imagine how what should be such a lucrative business has had such a torrid time. And while it’s doom and gloom at that commercial end of fine art, there are green shoots at the creative end with HP’s launch of a tool that enables fine art photographers and print makers to output contact negatives on its Designjet machines. I have to confess I have an interest, as in the past I have dabbled in the beautiful alternative print processes, and they were the topic of my final degree project.

Back then, 15 years ago, making contact-sized negatives was becoming difficult in the darkroom, largely as the continuous tone graphic arts films needed were on their last legs as scanning and desktop publishing did away with the complex colour separation processes of yore. At that time there were a few photographic printers playing with imagesetting film and the then novel FM screening to produce suitable negatives, but it was tricky to find a bureau or printer happy to tie up their imagesetter for a finicky photographer’s experiments.

Way back then I tried to use my desktop printer (an Epson Stylus Pro 500) to produce negatives with limited success. The high density needed was only possible with OHP films, and the coatings and inks back then limited you to a measly and gritty 360dpi. Not something compatible with the double cream tonality of a platinum print. In the end my experiments moved on and it was the combination of handmade watercolour paper that I’d come to love from printing gum bichromate, platinum and kallitype along with the humble inkjet’s colour capabilities that focused my efforts on a poor man’s giclee.

With HP’s new development I feel an urge to dust off the darkroom and go painting with light again now the latest digital technology has moved on enough to match the nuances of the nineteenth century’s finest photographic printing processes.

People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, and people addressing a group of MPs at The House of Commons should get their facts straight. Especially when they are trying to promote the printed medium against electronic forms on the grounds that it encourages a more thoughtful, deliberate and accurate discourse.

At the All-Party Parliamentary Print Group Reception, Two Sides director Martyn Eustace posited the idea that if we knew our words would end up in print we’d be more considered about what we said or wrote.

Unfortunately he fell into his own trap, referring to “The gentleman who dashed off a few lines in an email about September the 11th being a good day to bury bad news.”

He continued: “Perhaps if he’d committed his thoughts to paper first, he wouldn’t have sent the message.”

Poor Martyn, he didn’t check his facts before opening his mouth – I can’t recall if he was speaking from notes – but if he was it proves the fallacy of his argument even more.

For that gentleman wasn’t a gentleman. Cast aside political prejudices and opinions of whether special advisors/spin doctors can ever be gentlefolk, for Jo Moore who was at the time special adviser to Secretary of State for Transport, Local Government and the Regions Stephen Byers, could never be considered a gentleman for a far more obvious reason – she was a woman.

Martyn’s gaffe, especially given that it was made at the seat of British political power to politicians, who may have more than a passing acquaintance with the story, is at the very least unfortunate.

Two Sides stated aim is to dispel myths about the sustainability of print and paper, but if it can’t get its own facts straight it risks undermining its good work and its best intentions.

Maybe he couldn’t face the slog to Colindale to the British Library newspapers collection to sniff out the primary sources on paper. However, in this instance digital media trumps print, from the comfort of my own browser a quick search of the term “a good day to bury bad news” turned up contemporaneous stories from The Telegraph and BBC websites, a Wikipedia page on Ms Jo Moore and a link to the Select Committee on Public Administration’s report into the affair.

I want Two Sides to succeed in its aims to promote print and paper and I believe there is a good story to tell about our medium. Both its inherent sustainability and the impact that the format information is presented in has on understanding and recall. Therefore I don’t want it to undermine its own case by resorting to facile arguments that don’t hold water.

As the hubbub of Fespa subsides and the important themes and trends to emerge from the show are thrown into sharper focus one topic where there was much to be seen, although maybe less being sold, was colour consistency.

While typically marketing will focus on bigger gamuts and brighter colours, day-to-day the issue is more likely to be one of stable colour and the accurate matching of results across different processes, substrates and machines.

When it comes to colour consistency the world of offset commercial print has got something of a head start over the wide-format market. But that's no bad thing as it means there are firm foundations to build on, and a lot of the legwork has been done.

For the past decade offset printers have been slowly creeping towards printing to the ISO 12647-2 standard, using various methodologies and specifications to get there. In Europe most firms have opted to use Fogra's 39L dataset, which defines how an offset print made to ISO 12647-2 should look in a way that can be applied as an ICC profile across other substrates and print processes.

The big news at Fespa included Fujifilm's launch of Pro-File, a pre-press software tool to help match the firm's entire range of inkjet printers, and screen print produced using its ink, to the Fogra data. And, within the limits of a trade show and its uncontrollable lighting conditions, the firm did a convincing job of showing that it could produce proofs and digital and screen prints that matched a previously produced offset job. That it managed to match prints produced across its Acuity, Onset and Uvistar machines shows what is possible with a little bit of effort.

A more open approach was shown by the Color Alliance with its Quality Assurance Kit. The Color Alliance was set up by several substrate suppliers to standardise the colour reproduction across their materials. It's good that they have realised that there is more to the matter than just getting the coating right and that it takes education throughout the workflow right up to the originator to make it all work. The alliance also recognises the need, even if the substrates are more consistent to get colour right within the RIP.

Sun Chemical showed a screen printing ink designed to offer similar simplicity and consistency across multiple substrates, while both Optronix and Laurie Mullaney Associates showed the necessary tools to ensure screens and films are produced to the correct specifications.

All these tools help printers to hit customer's colours quicker and more consistently, which hopefully will result in fewer complaints and reprints and less waste. The colours themselves may not be any brighter, but the fortunes of any printer adopting these techniques should be, and for some may be the difference between being in the black or in the red.

 

James Cameron’s latest blockbuster Avatar’s release on DVD has provided a boost to wide-format print with Bezier and Riot of Colour benefiting from POS to promote the new movie.

Both have in their own way gone for print techniques that promote the fact that the film is in 3D, albeit in different ways.

Bezier’s work is by its very nature three-dimensional, with some units even providing a walk-through experience. Riot of Colour’s work is claimed to be the largest ever lenticular reproduced in London.

As an otherwise flat image brought to life with depth effects the work of Riot of Colour is more akin to the film’s reproduction of 3D by using optical effects to simulate the perception of depth on a flat screen by presenting different images to each eye.

Movie mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg is a big believer in the future of 3D, not just for movies but for all media. In a recent interview with Time magazine he talked about a future where all screen-based digital media was 3D, adding that a 2D representation of reality was itself the odd-one out.

Katzenberg said: “That billboard that you look up at now that has no dimensionality--that's the thing that's pulling tricks on your mind.”

It’s an interesting point, but he also talk about a time when 3D is so ubiquitous that everyone carries a pair of special 3D glasses around at all times to be able to view all the added depth.

The recent pieces of print to promote a 3D film, that does need special glasses, and screens, both make use of different sorts of 3D technology that require far less complexity either for the creator or the viewer.

Bezier created three dimensions in print through nothing more complicated than some cardboard engineering, while Riot of Colour’s lenticular effect – which can reproduce movement as well as depth without the viewer needing to have remembered their special glasses relies on nothing more complicated than some ridged plastic and good registration.

Time claims 3D will change movies, TV and advertising as we know it. The change has already started, in the oldest of media – print – and in a way that is effective, affordable and doesn’t require the viewer to buy any new technology to take advantage.

Over the weekend I stumbled on a fantastic season of programmes on BBC Four: The Beauty of Maps, which is available online via the BBC iPlayer.

This wonderful celebration of cartography contained some real gems highlighting the part print played in the development of the mapmakers’ art, including footage showing original copper intaglio plates being printed at the Plantin printing museum in Antwerp.

Another delight was the reproduction of the Hereford World Map, the largest the surviving medieval mappa mundi produced by The Folio Society.

Recreating this 700 year-old map involved historians, photographers, retouchers and printers from the UK and Germany, and 1.4x1,2m definitely qualifies as a large-format work.

All this activity coincides with a major exhibition about maps at the British Library in London: Magnificent Maps: Power, Propaganda and Art.

It’s a timely reminder of the longevity of print and just how long we’ve been using large-format printing to communicate. Who knows what will be left in 700 years time of today’s cutting-edge cartographic developments such as Google Earth and Street View, and how easy it will be to access via any artefacts left.

I can’t help wondering if I’d have ever seen anything about this fascinating feast of print in the form of The Folio Society reproduction and British Library exhibition, if it wasn’t for the marvel that is the UK’s public TV network, the BBC. It would be a tragedy if communication of the power of print, albeit via TV, was imperilled by the politicking of media magnate Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp behemoth.

Why should anyone in the wide-format market give two hoots that HP has launched a 3D printer?

After all, with a maximum output size of 203x203x152mm it’s not by any stretch of the imagination large-format.

But that’s to miss the point a little, who 20-odd years ago could have conceived that the pen plotters that were starting to be used to output CAD drawings would morph into full-colour near photographic quality wide-format colour printers spurring a revolution in display graphics and signage.

I can’t give you any easy answers as to what these new machines can be used for, but I have a feeling that a some clued up people in the print-for-pay market with more imagination and business acumen than me could come up with half-a-dozen applications that it could be relevant to at the drop of a hat.

We often talk about how print is a medium that can add an extra dimension to a client’s messages, so in this case when it very literally can, just imagine what the potential possibilities might be.

EFI Vutek’s launch of the MediaMaster automated loading system for its GS3200 printer puts the firm back in the running as a player in the high volume flatbed market.

While the GS series, which was launched last year, offers decent throughput in square metres per hour, the problem with any manually loaded system is that, regardless of its theoretical throughput, actual results are dependent on the ability of the operator to keep up with the machine.

Handling large single sheets can be tricky, as can loading multiple smaller sheets onto the bed to take advantage of the whole print width.
EFI’s launch of automatic handling highlights the importance of understanding all the factors that influence productivity and not just raw square metres per hour printed.