Hi, this is Frank Romano from WhatTheyThink.com.  I'm here at the Mohunk?  Mountain House, it’s at the top of a mountain somewhere in the Catskills.  I have no idea.  Coming up her was fun, going down should be even more fun. 

In any case, for the second year in a row, I’ve been one of the judges on the Mohawk i-Tonies Award, which is an award given to companies using Mohawk paper with Indigo digital printing.  And the judging has been completed.  The winner will be announced at the DScoop meeting in February in Texas somewhere.  And we’re running right after this.  So, I’d like to show you the winners and just generally just talk about what’s happening with the digital printing. 

First of all, one of the things I’ve discovered here is that many of you who print with digital because the runs are so short don’t have samples.  You’re not printing a few extra copies that you can enter into competitions.  So, all of you might want to think about this that if you’re printing some jobs, if they’re interesting, and perhaps award worthy, you might want to print a few extra copies and keep them around; one, as samples for your sales people, but two, to enter into any competitions that occur. 

I’ll go through the three runner’s up and then into the finalists.  This is a piece from Coca Cola.  It was printed by Bennett Graphics in Georgia.  Again, there were almost 60 entries in this competition and the judges had some interesting challenges in bringing it down to the number that they did.  But, this piece here doesn’t use a PMS red; it’s using a tinted red that they are printing.  And it was a corporate piece more than anything else.  Now, you’ll notice that the other pieces that have one are bound books.  And even though that tends to be a lot of what is printed digitally, we didn’t find a lot of variable data.  We didn’t find a lot of version pieces that are out there.  And I think that’s an area we should think about, what’s really happening with digital printing, right?  Where is the real action?  It was said it was going to be variable data, but that doesn’t seem to have occurred. 

A wonderful piece, by the way, is called Mother/Daughter Posing as Ourselves.  And it’s from the RIT Carrie Press in Rochester.  And Elaine O’Neil, who is the mother was the head of the photo school and now a teacher there, did a wonderful job posing with her daughter from an early age on, and it reminded me of the old Kodak advertisement that ran in the early 1980’s, and it was a Kodak executive that took a picture of his daughter in front of the door of their house in Rochester every year on her birthday.  And they put some music behind it and it was just a wonderful commercial reminiscent of the concept of the Kodak moment.  Well, if you look at this book, it is actually a lot of Kodak moments with mother and daughter posing together.  And just beautifully photographed, and then beautifully printed, and printed, by the way, with multiple grays.  So, it’s not a CMYK printed book, so, beautifully, beautifully done. 

The third runner up is the Ella Mantelli book.  And it is from Findley Graphics in Connecticut.  Here again, a bound publication oversized, and by the way, a lot of the pieces, by the way, are oversized, but absolutely gorgeous in every aspect. 

Now, this is a Mohawk competition, so they are all printed on Mohawk paper.  Now, Mohawk is best known for there uncoated papers, beautiful, beautiful papers, and all different grades of their papers have been used for various projects here.  But the most interesting one, of course, and the Grand Prize Winner, if you will, was printed on Chrome Coat.  Last year, Mohawk Paper made an arrangement with Smart Papers; I think they absorbed the organization and the distribution and now are selling Chrome Coat, a coated stock.  Well, here is the Grand Prize Winner. 

First of all, you have this unbelievable embossed cover and it has a coating on it that’s actually done, that is usually applied to glass, so right off the bat, the cover is extremely, extremely dramatic.  Now, it happens to involve Dubai of all places.  And this is when they had money.  So, you can see this is absolutely beautifully printed in every way.  Look at the coverage here.  Of course, black is the easiest thing to cover that way.  But even in the color and the cross-overs, in every way, this thing is absolutely an aware winner.  Now, this was printed by Texas Graphics.  Now how a company in Texas got a job for somebody in Dubai, although I think the organization that was doing the planning was based in Texas, and that’s why it turned out that way.  But there are some pages that when they are printed, they have a luminescent effect that is absolutely gorgeous as well. 

So, that is the Grand Prize Winner of the IToneys Award for Mohawk Paper. 

So, overall what we’re seeing then in digital printing, short runs are dominating more than variable data and of course versioning.  Bound publications seem to be in the majority at this stage of the game.  We’d like to see more personalization, and of course, a lot of photo books are coming through.  And those photo books are, today we call them photo books, but they are a lot of photo materials, like calendars and things like that.  We’d like to see more of that stuff in these competitions as well. 

So, thank you very much for watching and take care. 

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