When a commercial isn’t a commercial
While Trade Trends abjures the role of product plugger, when it comes to clean operations there’s always a soft spot in your columnist’s innards. So it will come as no surprise that I was more than impressed by Agfa Graphics’ new :Azura TS that made its debut at drupa 2008.
Combining a gum-based clean-out with a more sensitive coating, it provides significantly higher throughput on thermal platesetters. Using Agfa’s ThermoFuseTM technology which physically bonds images to the plate without any chemical processing it results in stable and predictable imaging and no mess since the simple gumming process cleans the plate and gums it in one simple step, making it press-ready without the need for chemical processing.
What more can a low-to-medium-volume commercial printer who adopts the system ask…
Taken to the cleaners by the old mill
And while we’re talking about cleaning things, there was the wonderful watermill setting of machine cleaning outfit, Renzman. Coming as they do from a well-known German winemaking area, Renzman set its automated cleaning technology presentation in a “gem?tchliche” wine tavern.
There was obviously a lot of wine, a smattering of women but no song – – just a simulated washing room area (and probably a drying out area too for the over-imbibed).
Slowly catchee monkey
Last year FedEx Kinko opened 252 centres out of a planned 300 so there are still 50 to go before the end of the financial year. But look at this!
Reality seems to have set in because the global shop front giant has let it be known that, given the weak economic outlook, the outlet increase will have considerable brake pedal pressure applied, resulting in slowing the rate of expansion in fiscal 2009, to a mere 70 new locations.
Amos handy
Some few months back I had a conversation with Kodak’s Julie Hess, who has considerable Creo background in her CV. I asked her what it had been like working with Amos Michelson, and she gave me a somewhat equivocal answer.
Here’s perhaps a little insight into the background and thinking of this quixotic industry figure when talking about the early days of CtP.
Said Michelson, “We wanted to understand the economics in both prepress and the press room. We asked RR Donnelley to aggregate the cost of analogue plates in different factories and segments of their operation. They were shocked to discover that any two RR Donnelley plants could pay prices that were up to double of the other, even in the same segment of the industry. So for example, one plant paid $1.20 per square foot and another paid $0.60, buying from the exact same manufacturer. As a result of that analysis, they immediately engaged procurement and renegotiated contracts, as you can imagine. By the time they signed an agreement with us, they’d already saved more than the $12.4 million they were paying us (for the Creo installations). That worked against us to some degree, because the cost benefit of CtP in the prepress area was somewhat deteriorated before we delivered. However, the pressroom benefits remained intact.”
People need people, or do they?
Heard about the recently patented MAN Roland commercial web and newspaper offset APL system? It’s a patented gizmo for automatic plate changes with robot technology being used in newspaper printing – – an industry claimed first in printing. So who needs people?
Good news from the gents at Ghent
PDF file integrity can now be more readily verified as a result of The Ghent Workgroup’s (GWG) recent release of the first free “Proof of Preflight” specification. When implemented in a software solution, this best practice specification offers users the ability to review a PDF file’s preflight audit trail, including a digital signature, at any time during the design to print workflow. The capability provides users the assurance that they can safely accept a PDF file with a Proof of Preflight. As a result, the process verifies which GWG preflight Specification was used to preflight the file and also the outcome of the preflight check. Check.
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