SLO Printing Week

SAN LUIS OBISPO—Cal Poly will host its annual International Printing Week, one of the largest and most comprehensive printing week events in the nation, from Tuesday, Jan. 19, to Friday, Jan. 22, 2010.

UV, Latex, Automation

Wide format is struggling to come out of the recession intact, and the survival plan seems to be coming down to three words: UV Latex and automation.

I Like This....

Inkjet keeps moving ahead, with extended gamut, spot colors, white, and now...metallic.

Roland DG has released the Soljet Pro III XC-540MT – a 54” (137cm) inkjet printer/cutter featuring CMYK, white and new, metallic silver, ink.

This silver ink can be printed as a spot colour, or combined with CMYK and white inks to produce a range of coloured metallic effects, including gold, bronze and pearlescent colours, says Roland.

The White Ink Stories Keep on Coming....

White ink printing continues to dominate inkjet news, this time on the rip side:

"The Wasatch Tracer provides a streamlined white ink workflow so users can spend less time preparing their job and more time printing it. With the ability to render any contour cut path in white, the Tracer provides a powerful alternative to creation of white plates in third party graphics applications." Pretty cool, actually.

This one hurts...another mill closing

Smurfit-Stone Container Corporation today announced plans to permanently close its Ontonagon, MI, and Missoula, MT, mills, effective December 31.

Going green in Copenhagen

During the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, 30 hotels replace plastic key cards with renewable wooden key cards. The environmentally friendly key cards are a patent pending product manufactured and supplied by the company Sustainable Cards using UPM’s veneer.

Another White Ink Story

EFI has won a lawsuit against Durst involving white ink technology in its 3200 series printers.

Slowing down, but not stopping

Flexo is slowing down in the recession, but it's not standing still.

Yes, this is a big deal

Epson's new WT7900 brings opaque white printing ability to the inkjet world, using an aqueous based ink. Not a toner, the technology uses hollow core resins that give the illusion of opaque white, and prints on paper, plastic or foil. This could be big because the flexo/packaging world's resistance has until now ben based on the inability of inkjets to print white.

Painless RGB to CMYK?

Everybody wants an easy fix to RGB-CMYK conversions. American Printer explains why there is more to it than meets the eye!

Atoms Are a Drag

Do we need to get beyond stuff?

Opportunity in Recession

Some people are finding ways to take advantage of the recession.

Alwan and Enfocus announce PDF Normalizer

This sounds interesting, a PDF color normalizer. Alwan is strong in color and Enfocus in PDF. A good match. But normalizing files to a standard color space presupposes that you know the color space of the supplied file...hardly a given. Then there is the $10,000 price.

The Los Angeles planning commission continues to dither on large format advertising. If this were a picturesque New England village I would probably feel differently, but this is LA!

In a city as generally blight-filled as Los Angeles, outdoor advertising is frequently the only part of the landscape that has any distinction at all. Sunset Blve is one of the most interesting drives in the city precisely because it has loads of outdoor advertising art.

Free the billboards!

HP Announces GRACoL certification for Indigo

"HP today announced its HP Indigo 5000, 5500 and 7000 digital press models have become the first digital color production systems to earn General Requirements for Applications in Commercial Offset Lithography (GRACoL) certification, a graphic arts standard for quality color printing".

Interesting. I've just set up a couple of Indigos to G7 specs, and they do a fantastic job, but I'd say that drift is still a potential problem...will they stay G7??? Read the whole thing: HP GRACoL Announcement

Don't Sweat the Small Stuff

Abhay Sharma, judging member of the IPA Board and chair of Ryerson University School of Graphic Communications Management, recently said, “Achieving low Delta-E values is no longer an issue for proofing technology today. Now it is more about workflow and ease of use.”

Amen to that. Get good close color and stay on top of it. And don't worry about the ultra-tiny deltaE variations. Publishing Executive has a good top-10 list for sensible color management>

Color Management in Firefox??

OK, most of us print guys don't bother with color management on the web, but it can be done. Rob Galbraith has a good tutorial.

The Color Blue

The color blue (Cyan plus Magenta in the CMYK world) is not only one of the most-used colors in graphic design, it is also one of the colors in which the human eye can most easily see differences.

The blues used in corporate design...Pepsi blue, Morton salt blue, Quaker Oats blue....are easy to identify and each is unique. Too bad that blue can also one of the toughest colors to reproduce accurately.

It may not help that the blue solid defined in the G7 characterization data set could have an internal inaccuracy.

Equal parts of Cyan and Magenta have a characteristic purplish cast through the range from light to dark...untill you hit solid, when the a* value dips and the cast takes a definite bluish turn. The source seems to be the original ISO 12647 data set, which was used as the basis for G7. The ISO committee recanted at the last minute and shifted the a* values for the solid blue overprint up by a full 5 steps of a* value, but G7 held steady.

Which is right? Many report that the G7 blue looks fine, but more are finding that they have to hold back on magenta density to keep their blues from going more reddish than the proof.

The G7 committee is taking input on this and it looks like the color blue will be revisited soon.