Hi this is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com. I saw this article the other day and it says “how much longer can photographic film hold out?” There’s an interesting chart that’s part of the article that shows the decline in the volume, the dollar volume, of film from 1995 to 2011; this year, but there’s a slight projection there. In any case, you can see an unbelievable decline. And I was at a meeting the other day where NEXPRESS, Kodak, gave out a number of samples. And I started to realize what has happened to the photo world. It has truly gone digital. Not only do you produce beautiful calendars; this was done on the NEXPRESS. Again, because of the size it can handle it can do something like this. I like the fact that it says it’s a 12 month calendar. I don’t know if there are six month calendars out there.

You can produce on materials that are very much like photo material and not only does Kodak make it for NEXPRESS but they also make it for the HP Indigo Machine. They gave out these two little booklets. This one has an uncoated cover but every photograph inside is coated and they area absolutely gorgeous. The one with the coated cover, all the images inside are uncoated and they are just as beautiful. Typical of a photo book; a photo book that now stores our memories if you will.

There was a little packet of samples showing different forms of coating. Of course, the NEXPRESS has the ability to do this dimensional clear so you get a texture associated it with. Of course there are other devices now that are doing textures or coating. The 8001 from Xerox is now doing that. The Scodix machine does a phenomenal job of doing that but this little booklet, different kinds of papers with different kinds of coating techniques shows the range of what you can do today with digital printing.

Now 1999, Weyerhaeuser produced these two books; one was done with offset lithography and one was done on the Zycon machine. They bound them exactly the same way. They used exactly the same paper and I dare say most people could not tell the difference between the two. I was recently at a meeting where Pearson had two textbooks printed at Coria in Massachusetts on an HP Indigo Web Press and they were daring people to tell the difference between the two; which was offset and which one was inkjet.

So I contend that today the standard for quality is no longer offset. I believe it is truly digital printing. Our digital printing devices have moved to the highest levels. Now, can they do pantone colors? Only the Indigo does that at the present time but they handle a very large array of pantone colors. Is that an attribute of quality? That’s an attribute of productivity perhaps but in terms of quality, I think digital printing has not only equaled offset lithography, I think it has gone beyond offset lithography.

And that’s my opinion.