This is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com.  Welcome back to another episode.  I love beautiful printing.  No doubt about it.  I found three things at the Graph Expo show I picked up that might be of interest to you.  This is a little book done by Indigo, Hewlett Packard if you will, celebrating the 10^th anniversary of the Hewlett Packard Indigo relationship.  It is filled with a lot of nostalgic pictures and talks about the relationship.  Of course we forget that Indigo actually introduced their machine in 1993, in fact, September of 1993 to be specific, which means in a few years they will be celebrating 20 years, 20 years since digital color printing became available and I’d have to say that phenomenal progress has been made in that period of time in not only the development of the machines, but in the applications that are being applied by printers all over the world.  As their Dscoop Conference, which is a user’s group conference is now the largest in the world of any user group that is out there.

At Graph Expo Xerox had a meeting of their premier partners; this is a global network of printers who share jobs and move files around so that you can have things printed out almost anywhere you wish and what this did was indicate all of the winners for their competition and just beautiful examples of printing.  Now they are not the actual examples, but they are pretty good reproductions of them and so in fact, what I liked was the fact that they tied in not only the winner, but also an indication of how big the market was for each of the different kinds of applications that were out there and quite a few and this is worldwide.  These are not only North American, but winners from all over the globe.

At the Kodak booth they used their technology to print out a calendar.  This was done on an XPress, a toner-based machine using their dimensional clear ink, which adds texture to just about anything and just as you would expect from Kodak absolutely gorgeous imagery.  This is a 2012 calendar.  By the way, here is one where they added texture to the water at the lower part there.  I’m glad they didn’t give out a 2011 calendar because it would be too late.  2012 is absolutely perfect.

So tying in gorgeous photography with gorgeous printing of course is something you would expect from Kodak.  There were many others of course, but these were the ones that I picked up and the ones that I lugged back with me, which is not an easy task nowadays considering how much material is available at the shows.

I'm just so impressed with the quality of digital printing, digital color printing especially and how it has advanced to the point today where it’s as consistent as offset lithography and in some cases I believe based on photographic imagery, exceeds some of the quality that we see in offset lithography.  If you want very long runs offset is great, but if you want those short runs with high quality then I think digital printing does the job.  It’s no longer the case that digital printing has to take a backseat to anybody.  Digital printing today is applicable for just about anything that is out there in terms of printed work.  So in any case, three excellent examples of wonderful printing from the Graph Expo show and that’s my opinion.