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By Noel Ward, Editor @ Large What works and what doesn’t? What is making you crazy and keeping you up at night? Where is the money going? And how about the profits? One of the best parts of the work I do is getting inside printing operations, learning about the different issues print providers...

By Noel Ward, Editor @Large Well, maybe you haven’t been hacked (that you know of), but chances are one or more of your customers has, whether or not they are willing to admit it. I was getting a glass of wine at the One Canon event a few weeks back when Carlos Fernandes the head of Agile...

As near as I can tell, the USPS couldn't find a single one of its post offices using a military spec GPS, a map with the post office marked on it, and a dozen employees. And you expect them to figure out how to ship a package to the far side of the world? Right. Like that will happen. I'm...

By Noel Ward When the first high speed inkjet machines, all roll-to-roll devices, began reaching the market there was a lot of skepticism. Even some of the journalists and analysts with whom I swap perspectives weren’t sure inkjet was going to be a real player. Some thought (or maybe hoped)...

by Noel Ward, Editor@Large What do you do when things go sideways? What does your team do? Who decides? And how do people feel when it’s all over? Successful? Or maybe like everyone just dodged a bullet? When things don’t go according to plan, there are usually a few people in any organization...

by Noel Ward, Editor@Large Ask yourself a question: How dependent is your business on the support available for the equipment and technology on your shop floor? If your company is like most others in our industry the answer is probably something like, “More than I’d like it to be.” To minimize...

Episode 3: Ink and Substrates Matter by Noel Ward, Editor@Large So you know inkjet is the game changer and has a lot of room to grow and change, and that an inkjet press running coated or glossy paper offers more paths to profitability. Priming fluids may have helped, but are not necessarily...

Episode 2: To Prime or not to Prime? by Noel Ward, Editor@Large The story so far: Inkjet printing on glossy and coated stocks is a Holy Grail of inkjet printing. But like in human relationships, there’s chemistry involved, only here it is the chemistry of inks and the surface of the paper. The...

Episode 1: Where Ink and Paper Meet By Noel Ward, Editor@Large It’s probably no coincidence that adoption of high-speed inkjet printing has been growing right along with the throughput speeds of the presses. But for all they offer, high-speed inkjet systems have typically lacked the ability to...

By Noel Ward, Editor@Large If you aren’t a Xeikon customer or prospect, or just didn’t go to the recent Xeikon Cafe in Chicago, you missed a great event. We’ll get to that. But first, a bit of history. That was then… A quarter century ago, at a trade show called IPEX (now a mere shadow of its...

By Noel Ward, Editor@Large Early fall is a fine time to go to south Florida. Hurricanes are (maybe) a bit less likely to disrupt travel plans, the temps have dropped out of the nineties and although the humidity is still there, the lower end of the Sunshine State is not a bad place to be...

By Noel Ward, Editor@Large Trying not to be snarkier than usual, I look back on four days at PRINT 17, remembering what it once looked like, thinking about what many I spoke with said about the show, and wondering what universe NPES lives in when they say this show went well. To be sure, the...

By Noel Ward, Editor @Large Back in the “long strange trip it’s been” days of the Seventies I was riding right seat in a west-bound 18-wheeler, talking with the driver about roads, distances and his life as a trucker. He pointed to a truck streaming east, running well above the speed limit...

Nothing inconsistent here. I'm just reporting what several seasoned print pros told me. The CTO was not the first one to tell me he was done buying offset presses. Heard this last year from IJ press owners. And... that some are dumping their (formerly) high-end toner boxes because they don't...

By Noel Ward The machine is deep blue, maybe 30 feet long, 10 feet high and deep. The owner calls it a variable offset press. It resides in a climate-controlled room, just outside of which an 8-color Speedmaster churns out work at 18,000 sheets per hour. The big blue inkjet press may be far...

Hi Visar, Just saw your response. Sadly there's not a quick answer to your question. And if you don't have digital presses you have somewhat fewer options. Still, begin with your presses. The major offset press makers and the companies that sell plate-setters have digital workflow software...

By Noel Ward, Editor@Large Raise your hand if you remember jobs coming in on CDs or DVDs. Thanks! Now raise your hand if you remember jobs coming in on Zip Drives? A few more. Very good! How about on SyQuest drives? Excellent! (How does if feel to be that old?) Finally, how many of you had...

Chris R... With 11 million clicks on your 7010 you don't have much to complain about. Color toner machines normally have issues well before that point, and all the things mentioned here are not unusual on that box. Or various others. In my opinion, Xerox is trying to get back into the game and...

I'm more familiar with the Canon, but both are very good machines. Personally, I like the Canon, but such judgements are pretty subjective. As you already have a Canon, you might get a sweeter deal from your Canon dealer. Unless one machine has real advantages over the other for your needs...

By Noel Ward, Editor@Large Taking the jackets off your offset presses is the first advantage of adding LED-UV dryers to your press. After that, things get even better, putting an end to conventional drying methods while eliminating environmental concerns associated with old-school UV curing...