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Digital Trends from the Show #1
September 11, 2007

Did you ever get a phone you knew immediately was trouble? Last Friday I got a call at 7 AM saying, “Where are you? We just had a cancellation for the Graph Expo R & E Breakfast Monday Morning and need you to make a presentation about Digital Products and Trends at the show.”

Of course the smart guy would say “Hi this is Howie Fenton, I’m sorry I’m not here to take your phone call right now but if you leave your name and number I’ll call you back as soon as I can”. Never the smart guy I said, “No problem”

While sounding like a heroic offering, like most things in life if you know “the tricks of the trade” the impossible becomes possible. These tricks are double dog top secret so if I share them with you have to promise not to tell anyone. Ok now hold up your right hand and promise to adhere to the unwritten rules of the poorly written blogs. And remember - failure to obey and you will be found in contempt of blogs.

Here are the secrets to achieving the most efficient and productive Graph Expo experience. (Leave it to a workflow /efficiency guy to think about something as arcane as this.) First the major publications often have previews of products that will be announced which are posted on their web pages. Second, every year there is a great show called the Executive Outlook which occurs on the Saturday before the show which includes a publication called the Must See Ums. This best of show award is judged by industry consultants and analysts and is available Saturday night. Another good source of new technology and products are the InterTec Technology Awards.

Armed with that information I walked the showroom floor and decided that the following were the digital trends at the show: automation, 3-D, digital books, and web to print. The issues were integration issues with MIS systems and concerns about the new Microsoft XPS file format. 

There were a number of product introductions that focused on server automated and optimization of images using hot folders. For example Fuji’s C-Fit  Image Intelligence takes batches of color images and automatically optimizes, and converts them. C-fit trains the software to view pictures the way that people do, by recognizing and adjusting for image types (faces, indoor/outdoor scenes, etc.) and memory colors that are important to the way a picture looks

The other was the Alwan Color Expertise CMYK Optimizer version 3 for color preflighting, standardization and optimization of CMYK separations and data.  CMYK Optimizer helps service providers achieve optimal print quality and proof matching.

Another emerging trend was the use of 2-D and 3-D images. This is becoming very clear in the sign business in which signs that either appear to have depth or actually have depth (cutters, routers and engravers) are more valuable then their single dimension equivalents. A suite of software products that added depth to photos was introduced by Human Eyes and called 3D software. This software can take images and convert them to 3D and create 2D effects – such as flips,
movement, zoom, rotation and opacity.

Many of the digital printing manufacturers were discussing the growth in the digital book market. There are several different types of digital books but the two largest categories are self published books in which individuals can post there own books and customers can order them one at time. The other are picture books in which customers upload digital pictures which are printed by a digital press and send back.

Most of the manufacturers of web to print solutions were offering upgrades to their technologies. Web to print solutions remains one of the best new strategies that service providers can offer their customers because it can result in decreased costs, and faster turnaround times and improve the convenience for the customers. In the 2007 NAPL Digital Services report we unveiled at the show we focused on the common denominators of companies that are digital leaders. We looked at a host of services such as preflighting, 1-1 marketing, digital printing, web to print services, web page creation and variable data printing. The 3 services we found offered more by leaders was web to print, digital printing and creating and hosting web pages.

I am running beyond my 7000 character allotment for this blog… so I will have to discuss the issues in integration issues between MIS systems and web to print solutions and concerns about the new Microsoft XPS file format next time. Stay tuned.

Posted by Howie Fenton on September 11, 2007 | Comments (0)