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.