The Decision

[gordo]

 

[Deleted member 16349]

This seems to be what the general printing community is thinking. It is no surprise that they would, since most of the graphic industry publications are hot to praise digital printing even though it is still a small part of the total print production output. The community has never been given the chance to see and understand what improvements are possible to the offset process. This makes decisions for the future difficult.

I wish there were some kind of "Skunk Works" at some of the major printers, where there would have been scientific educated people, who would have been interested in investigating the potential of their offset processes but I have not seen that happening. The rule just seems to be to trust suppliers.

It is also a major problem that some of the so called engineers in the printing industry, who have come out of graphics programs, are not really engineers. They are technologists at best. Even some schools that claim to provide a print engineering program, seem to produce a lot of people with no imagination or the ability to analyze physical systems. They seem incapable of using first principles to understand a process. They mainly are taught about technologies from professors that also don't understand how to think. It is a form of technical inbreeding.

Gordon, todays "The Decision" goes deep into the problem that those in the industry face.

 

[Alois Senefelder]

Gentlemen and fellow Lithographers,


Pontificating from Erik !



Regards, Alois

 

[Deleted member 16349]

Gentlemen and fellow Lithographers,


Pontificating from Erik !



Regards, Alois

Alois, does this chart also apply to all the failed printing and press concepts that have been tried?

Failure of concepts can be directly related to a lack of knowledge or incorrect knowledge.

 

[Alois Senefelder]

Gentlemen, Erik and fellow Lithographers,



" Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently"

Henry Ford



Regards, Alois

 

[Possumgal]

From my experience, some of this changeover trend is in the smaller shops, where the bread and butter forms printing has been disappearing. Businesses either put some of their pieces on the internet, have them printed out of country, print them on office copiers, or it's come to a point at which it's cheaper to send out snap forms, receipt books and even business cards rather than doing them in house. Our shop does one tenth the offset printing it used to do. Small wonder some places think it might be better to just do away with the chemicals and plates and go all digital.

 

[Repro_Pro]

Whenever an offset shop dumps its' presses, the positions of the remaining offset shops strengthen.

 

[MailGuru]

Whenever an offset shop dumps its' presses, the positions of the remaining offset shops strengthen.

From the movie "Other People's Money"

" .......And you know the surest way to go broke? Keep getting an increasing share of a shrinking market............"

 

[Repro_Pro]

"...hey, I just heard two of my fiercest competitors are dumping their offset presses
... if that's true, I should re-evaluate, the odds may be much better now...!?"