Hi, this is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com.  In recent days I have attended two press events.  One was a virtual one online.  The other was an actual live one at the On Demand Show.  First was Cannon’s introduction showing of the Dream Labo, which is an inkjet machine for producing photographic materials, photo books, photo materials and then a virtual presentation by Xerox for a new version of toner for the iGen4 called the EXP Press and they sent samples, unbelievably beautiful samples and as you know the iGen3 now can do a very large sheet of paper, so here you have those and you have a book that they did.

Now what Xerox did was they created a new kind of toner and call it whatever you want, but the fact is they made a toner that can reproduce photographic images very, very closely.  In other words, they can get very close to what silver halide did.  By the way, I don’t even think we should compare anything to silver halide anymore.  I don’t know if that becomes a—I think the new standard is really digital printing when you get right down to it.

Now I would love to show you samples from Cannon, but they didn’t give us any.  They showed us some samples, but they did it in the dark.  The room was in subdued lighting.  All the lighting was from the machine and the people’s speaking and so when they passed out the samples you could barely see them.  It was probably, I'm being honest about this, the worse press conference I've ever been to.  I mean I think they have an interesting machine that could do well in the marketplace and the photo marketplace needs machines in the toner side of the world and the inkjet side of the world, but they didn’t do a very good job organizing it, giving us any material.  There were no handouts.  They took everyone to dinner.  I did not go because I didn’t think any questions were going to be answered because it was just a showing of a technology.  When it will be introduced I'm not sure, but using inkjet with more than CMYK certainly expands the gamut and gives them some advantages.  

So here you have two systems and by the way there are many others now in the market and entering the marketplace to produce photo books, photo materials.  I mean if you think about it.  If you only make prints, and by the way, the Dream Labo makes prints as well as making books, but if you want to make bound publications machines like the iGen4 give you that advantage to have inline finishing and so I can produce this kind of a publication.  

I mean when you go to a wedding now it used to be only there bride and groom got the book.  There were photographs and they were mounted in an album.  Today that’s a digitally printed publication and by the way, the wedding party gets it and perhaps other people who came to the reception receive a copy of it as well.  I would love to see the copy of the book done for the Clinton wedding.  Some day one of those books is going to be on eBay for a lot of money because this is the way the world is going.  You’re going to have prints in some cases, although I'm not sure why you need them anymore because really putting them into these publications allows you to share them with many people in a more interesting way.

So I'm sorry to be critical about Cannon, but guys you have to get your act together and somebody has to tell you that and since I have no ties to any of you my feeling is I should be the one.  I think Xerox did an excellent job in putting all this together and actually providing samples.  If you want me to comment on it I have to see what it looks like.

Thank you all very much because that’s my opinion.  

Will there be a revival of offset lithography?  I think there will.  I think there are things coming that will revive offset lithography.