Premedia Trends, Sponsored By Epson
Printing workflow, print process and imaging trends.
On My Honor
A handful of things are going on this year, some of which I plan to celebrate. Others I will pretend not to notice.* That was me! ’50s Boy Scout signaling from one hilltop to another. My pal Chris Twig and I used to use Morse Code and home-made heliographs to send coded messages to each other from opposite hilltops. One that I am celebrating is the 100th birthday of the Boy Scouts of Amer ...... Read More
Comments (2)Speaking of densitometers
This morning as I was reading 100 patches on a gray ramp for the blog I posted earlier today, I was using the new X-Rite 530 spectro-densitometer. This is a delightful instrument, and a capable device for use in the pressroom, in prepress, or in the field (as strange as that may seem, it’s certainly possible, as it’s battery-powered and self-contained). The X-Rite 530 spectro-densi ...... Read More
Comments (1)Prosper dot gain
I sat down this morning with an X-Rite spectro-densitometer, and I read 100 dot area readings from the sample sheet I have from Kodak’s Prosper printer. It seems like a daunting task, but it’s really not that hard. Just takes time. I was surprised by the amount of the gain on this press, which is slightly higher than the amount of gain I would expect from an offset press. Going back ...... Read More
Comments (0)Pastels on Prosper
I have been poring over my Prosper samples, looking at the fine details, and admiring the images. One of the toughest things for any printing technology to do is to hold microscopically small pastel tones, and have them not either drop out of gain and change tone. This is one of the pastel blocks that was printed on the Prosper press. The percentages are as noted, and then the aggregate into com ...... Read More
Comments (0)Live long and Prosper
This morning I was up early examining color gamuts. I like to be up blogging before the sun rises so that I can spend time here without any commercial interruptions. I found myself wanting to continue this experimentation and analysis as I lay in half-sleep this morning. I guess some people dream of sandy beaches in the Caribbean; I dream about microscopic ink-jet spots that make up halftone imag ...... Read More
Comments (0)Ink drops keep falling on my head
I wrote about the new Kodak Prosper press a few weeks back, and left you with the promise that I would write more about this extraordinary machine. Here it is. I have been working with Bilge Altay, a graduate student in Graphic Communication who is visiting from Istanbul. As part of her Master’s thesis, she has been taking a very close look at the output of the Kodak Prosper press. Today, ...... Read More
Comments (0)It was a Big News day
At about 11:04 this morning PDT, I turned my attention to the promised keynote speech by Steve Jobs at Macworld in San Francisco. I watched over the Internet the first few seconds of commentary by Macworld magazine writers, and then, suddenly, the connection froze and I was unable to read any more of the commentary. The new Apple iPad is a feature-rich portable computing tablet from the company ...... Read More
Comments (0)Today is a big news day!
With yesterday’s announcement that Quad will buy World Color (AKA Quebecor/World) the printing industry is turned on its ear. This is good news for World Color, whose financial troubles were so publicly laundered that one had to wonder if they would come out clean. QuebeQuad or QuadWorld or QuadColor or whatever it will be called will be a formidable organization (It will be called Quad/G ...... Read More
Comments (0)EFI promises to revolutionize printing user interface
In a lecture at Cal Poly last Thursday, John Grubb, Worldwide Manager, Education Services at Electronics For Imaging (and a Cal Poly Graphic Communication alumnus) made several assertions about printing that got my attention. He and others at EFI are making the rounds and talking to the media about changes that EFI is about to make to the process of printing. They are going to change the face of ...... Read More
Comments (0)Goss RSVP will drop proprietary 2D code for a generic approach
I have written glowingly about the Goss RSVP 2D bar code technology. I am really impressed by this approach to broadening the scope of print advertising to include codes that make ads interactive with smart phones and computers. What didn’t impress me in the original offering was that Goss had chosen – for some very good reasons – a proprietary bar code scheme which isnȁ ...... Read More
Comments (0)Using Image Capture to drive an older scanner
Another victim of the Snow Leopard upgrade (I have written quite a bit about this since July) is that scanners made more than a few years ago will no longer work. This is nothing new, as we have experienced incompatibility between scanners and computers since the two technologies were invented. [I also remember a time when scanner manufacturers made their devices intentionally incompatible so tha ...... Read More
Comments (0)Poor Brian’s Almanack
“…we shall find out that Franklin was born in Boston, and invented being struck with lightning and printing and the Franklin medal, and that he had to move to Philadelphia because great men were so plenty in Boston that he had no chance, and that he revenged himself on his native town by saddling it with the Franklin stove, and that he discovered the almanac, and that a penny saved ...... Read More
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