I recently spoke at the Esko sales kick off event for 2007 at which the total sales operations for Esko worldwide attended a four-day meeting in Belgium. There were almost 200 people attending to hear Esko’s plans for ongoing sales through 2007. As a part of this event on day one there was a mini exhibition of all Esko’s systems to update the sales and support people on what all the products and systems could do. At this exhibition I came across an interesting company I  had heard about but not seen before who were negotiating an exclusive distribution agreement for Esko to sell their product into the worldwide pre-production packaging market.

The company is Stonecube from the UK, and their product was PrintyDevizor, a dynamic print visualizer. This product will be tightly integrated into the Esko Scope solution to allow creative staff and packaging print purchasers to visualize how a print job would look on the package. This is not just visualizing how the normal printed inks will appear but will allow in real-time the package to be viewed while different effects like embossing, special inks, varnishes, etc using different substrates are seen under different lighting conditions.

PrintDevizer is not new and the version I saw was version 2.2. It is already used in job creation and production by many companies, perhaps the best known of which is Hallmark Cards. What I saw was very unique piece of software that does things no other program I know of can do. The program is a unique software tool for both Mac and PC that allows on-screen viewing of moving 3D views of print designs under real-world lighting conditions. It allows the user to see the effects of different substrates, inks and finishes, even metallic and fluorescent inks, foils and embossing. The program is available at two levels, the first being PrintDevizer standard edition that is targeted at everyone in design and print. The second is PrintDevizer Pro that has extra features essential for packaging, labels, greeting cards and print finishing. The software supports special finish libraries for Adobe Creative Suite and Quark XPress. It also supports the Pantone Matching System including metallic and high intensity inks. Other special ink approaches such as MetalFX are also supported and other special inks can be added into the system. In the Pro mode it also supports viewing of die cutting and transparent materials.