Frank Romano: This is Frank Romano for WhatTheyThink.com. We're here in Hong Kong talking about Chinese printing with two Americans who are authorities on Chinese printing. They work for both Chinese printing companies and for American print buyers. So Joe Pasky, horror stories about Chinese printing.

Joe Pasky: Yes. When I first came here to China I was with my tour guide and we were visiting a half dozen printers up north and a couple of half dozen printers here down south and for the first five or six or seven printers I'm looking at the machines and there is no color bars. Well color bars around China are pretty unusual. They don't do color bars. I always say that that last half inch of the paper is probably their profit margin. So we finally get to a printer and say, "Wow, look, Drooner [ph] color bars. That's wonderful." I said, "What numbers are you running?" And, "What do you mean what numbers are you running?" "Well why are you printing the color bars?" "Because the customer told us to." I say, "Don't you measure them?" "Oh, they didn't tell us to measure them."

Gary Newbold: True that.

Joe Pasky: That's a true story.

Gary Newbold: True that. Well I can chime in right off the bat. I mean it's really true. Our main function over here is to really be the conduit, the bridge between the brand owner and the CPCs, consumer product companies and the printers to execute and maintain and give directions so that we meet and match the specification and achieve the quality that they want.

My biggest horror story is I go into some of these printers who may not be that great, but companies are looking to use less expensive printers or are not even using printers that they choose themselves, but they're being chosen for them by their OEM, the manufacturer of the product, the camera, the chair, the table, the lamp. They're the ones choosing the printers, so we'd go into these printers and many of them have never, not only colorblind Joe, have never seen a densitometer and the boss will come and say well we don't use those; we use these and I say yeah, we're going to use these and this to measure our color.

By the end of the week we usually have them singing praises and the boss is sending us an email saying where can I buy one of those spectrophotometers. They've seen the light.

Frank Romano: And the best story Joe, you had a story about them changing the ink colors to match.

Joe Pasky: A few weeks ago we were visiting a big reviewer cylinder manufacturer and we were kind of interested in how they control their color, their color management scheme and they have proofs sent in from the States, the inkjet proofs and we bring them down to their proofing room and they guys on the proofing presses are trying to match the proof and I said, "Well how do you do that?" He says, oh, we have a whole bunch of different colors of process inks and we change the process inks to match the proof and I'm thinking to myself well how the printer print those colors when he gets these cylinders on the press. I couldn't believe there is no color management and they're kind of mixing and matching as they go along to match the proof.

Frank Romano: And that's why you guys are here is to keep everybody honest.

Joe Pasky: Yes.

Frank Romano: Thank you very much.

Gary Newbold: Thank you.

Frank Romano: Let's talk about processes. So Joe, Pasky, what is happening? Is offset lithography still the dominant process?