noelward
Well-known member
Print Rocks!
By Noel Ward, Editor@Large
The press was this huge thing that took up half of the cavernous space in which it resided. I have no idea what it was, it being the first press I’d ever seen. “One of the colors isn’t right,” said my ad agency art director wife, so the pressman manipulated some mysterious controls and the color got better. It was still not what she wanted, so he worked his magic some more. The press churned on and soon spat out sheets she liked. We left. The job would be done later in the morning. It was a wee-hour press check and I was along because I thought it might be interesting. I had no idea of what I had seen or that a few years later I would be involved in a technology that would change an entire industry.
Flash forward a couple years to being an analyst at a market research firm. I was fascinated by machines I think were called Ektagraphics that ran at a whopping 60 pages a minute. I think they were just copiers but the speed seemed amazing. A page a second. Wow. I later learned that the faster and more sophisticated Xerox DocuTech was still in some lab in Rochester, NY.
I soon found myself running a project for an automaker, buying offset 2-color print, hanging out with the printer’s sales rep or the head of a printing company, a mail house, or figuring how and why a digital file had been corrupted. Once every quarter, my team would use half a dozen in-house laser printers and PCs to produce customized reports for a few hundred car dealers around the country. It was only black-and-white but each dealer’s data was fed by an early version of Excel, ably massaged by our IT person. To us and our client it was ground-breaking.
A couple years later I was helping quick printers set up Macintosh networks that uses QuarkXpress and Photoshop. It was still all monochrome.
Then came color
The big shift came when editing a magazine that started the conversation about this new thing called digital on-demand printing, which also happened to be in full-color. Sort of, anyway. One editor job led to another, augmented by countless visits to print shops in the U.S. and Europe. A tribe of other analysts, editors and writers were also involved but most had no idea about offset printing or the change we were seeing. We all heard resistance to digital printers (which their vendors insisted on calling presses), much of it aimed at the vendors which some perceived as arrogant and rude interlopers horning their way into a space they should not be in.
“It looks like toner,” I hear one print pro say to another at a trade show. “Yeah. Behaves like toner,” agreed his colleague as they walked away. Huh.
To use these new devices print pros had to rely on files created using software on desktop computers. Fonts and graphics caused all kinds of problems. Still do. Yet as the quality of digital print improved and print volume decreased the comparatively modest throughput of digital devices became more of a fit for market needs. There really seemed to be a place in the market for shorter runs. Were the big companies prescient? Or did they shape market demand and requirements? Was variable data truly important? Did fast turn-around and short runs prevail over print quality? Was perfect color always essential? The list of questions goes on and on.
What is “normal?”
Now digital printing is commonplace, a growing portion powered by inkjet devices which little over a decade ago were deemed second-string players. Now many of these are first rate, enabling consumers and even print pros to see inkjet as the first option for many jobs. I’ve had print pros with a pair of offset presses tell me,“I’ve bought my last offset press,” pointing out marks on the floor where the next inkjet printer would reside. The allure of sprayed ink is aided by things like color MFPs used for everyday stuff and even the 4-, 6- or 8-color desktop inkjet boxes consumers use for photos. Print has changed.
Big offset presses like the one I visited (or new versions of them) are still around and most are used daily. But digital printing has beome the norm. Most printers have at least one digital printer. They are, after all, just a tool and way to make money. The make and model you choose depends on the needs of your market, the skills of your sales and pre-press teams, and your own willingness to embrace digital print technology as a means of meeting customer needs. It has been an interesting journey and fascinating to see our marvelous industry change.
People I meet often groan inwardly when learning I am part of the printing industry. Then I explain how technical it has become and that things like achieving accurate color can be quite challenging. The lights go on when I explain that hardware, software and even A.I. are now integral parts of printing and that our industry is anything but boring.
While overall volume has certainly decreased, the range of things that can be done with printing has increased, largely thanks to the pervasive nature of digital print. Digital print, once an arrogant and rude interloper, is now just another way to put information on a page.
Print on!
By Noel Ward, Editor@Large
The press was this huge thing that took up half of the cavernous space in which it resided. I have no idea what it was, it being the first press I’d ever seen. “One of the colors isn’t right,” said my ad agency art director wife, so the pressman manipulated some mysterious controls and the color got better. It was still not what she wanted, so he worked his magic some more. The press churned on and soon spat out sheets she liked. We left. The job would be done later in the morning. It was a wee-hour press check and I was along because I thought it might be interesting. I had no idea of what I had seen or that a few years later I would be involved in a technology that would change an entire industry.
Flash forward a couple years to being an analyst at a market research firm. I was fascinated by machines I think were called Ektagraphics that ran at a whopping 60 pages a minute. I think they were just copiers but the speed seemed amazing. A page a second. Wow. I later learned that the faster and more sophisticated Xerox DocuTech was still in some lab in Rochester, NY.
I soon found myself running a project for an automaker, buying offset 2-color print, hanging out with the printer’s sales rep or the head of a printing company, a mail house, or figuring how and why a digital file had been corrupted. Once every quarter, my team would use half a dozen in-house laser printers and PCs to produce customized reports for a few hundred car dealers around the country. It was only black-and-white but each dealer’s data was fed by an early version of Excel, ably massaged by our IT person. To us and our client it was ground-breaking.
A couple years later I was helping quick printers set up Macintosh networks that uses QuarkXpress and Photoshop. It was still all monochrome.
Then came color
The big shift came when editing a magazine that started the conversation about this new thing called digital on-demand printing, which also happened to be in full-color. Sort of, anyway. One editor job led to another, augmented by countless visits to print shops in the U.S. and Europe. A tribe of other analysts, editors and writers were also involved but most had no idea about offset printing or the change we were seeing. We all heard resistance to digital printers (which their vendors insisted on calling presses), much of it aimed at the vendors which some perceived as arrogant and rude interlopers horning their way into a space they should not be in.
“It looks like toner,” I hear one print pro say to another at a trade show. “Yeah. Behaves like toner,” agreed his colleague as they walked away. Huh.
To use these new devices print pros had to rely on files created using software on desktop computers. Fonts and graphics caused all kinds of problems. Still do. Yet as the quality of digital print improved and print volume decreased the comparatively modest throughput of digital devices became more of a fit for market needs. There really seemed to be a place in the market for shorter runs. Were the big companies prescient? Or did they shape market demand and requirements? Was variable data truly important? Did fast turn-around and short runs prevail over print quality? Was perfect color always essential? The list of questions goes on and on.
What is “normal?”
Now digital printing is commonplace, a growing portion powered by inkjet devices which little over a decade ago were deemed second-string players. Now many of these are first rate, enabling consumers and even print pros to see inkjet as the first option for many jobs. I’ve had print pros with a pair of offset presses tell me,“I’ve bought my last offset press,” pointing out marks on the floor where the next inkjet printer would reside. The allure of sprayed ink is aided by things like color MFPs used for everyday stuff and even the 4-, 6- or 8-color desktop inkjet boxes consumers use for photos. Print has changed.
Big offset presses like the one I visited (or new versions of them) are still around and most are used daily. But digital printing has beome the norm. Most printers have at least one digital printer. They are, after all, just a tool and way to make money. The make and model you choose depends on the needs of your market, the skills of your sales and pre-press teams, and your own willingness to embrace digital print technology as a means of meeting customer needs. It has been an interesting journey and fascinating to see our marvelous industry change.
People I meet often groan inwardly when learning I am part of the printing industry. Then I explain how technical it has become and that things like achieving accurate color can be quite challenging. The lights go on when I explain that hardware, software and even A.I. are now integral parts of printing and that our industry is anything but boring.
While overall volume has certainly decreased, the range of things that can be done with printing has increased, largely thanks to the pervasive nature of digital print. Digital print, once an arrogant and rude interloper, is now just another way to put information on a page.
Print on!
