Diving into a Digital Sea

Don't cling to your analog past. Digital solutions abound. Analyze your operation, research your options and move into the digital age.

The technology is now securely in place for totally digital production of a job from initial design to printed piece. In the near future, in fact, the decisions you make may not be whether to go digital, but rather which parts of the digital pie you choose to bring in-house and which parts you use outside services for.

To make these decisions you need to be aware of the options that are available so that you can analyze your present and future needs and understand how best to fill them.

Evaluating Your Needs

The decisions you make will depend on several factors, including the size of your budget and the types of jobs that you run. Do you handle mostly single sheets? Brochures? Catalogs? What percentage of your work is color and what is black and white? Are you, like many in-plants, experiencing pressure to do more color work? Is most of your work short run or high volume? Do you foresee a need to be able to customize portions of the run?

If you have a generous budget and see a growing need for short-run color work where customizing is preferable, you may want to look at direct-to-print solutions that include output devices like the Agfa Chromapress or the Indigo series of digital presses.

If catalogs make up a large portion of your workload, your front end may include a digital camera for image capture.

If your work is a blend of new, digital components and pickups of conventional films, you might benefit from a CopyDot scanner from Eskofot, which can digitize conventional films for incorporation into the digital process.

In short, there are digital solutions for everything from image capture to design, page makeup, proofing, imagesetting and, finally, direct-to-press, on-demand printing. Only you can determine which of these solutions will pay off for your particular in-plant situation.

One important consideration is the rapid obsolescence of many of these products. The prepress equipment you invest in today may be out of date in as little as 24 to 36 months. You should target purchases that can pay for themselves in that time frame and plan your financing accordingly. Lease payments over a 60-month period are financially unsound for most businesses in light of the fact that newer technologies are constantly being introduced.

Another point to consider is your existing equipment and personnel. If possible or desirable, your new equipment should integrate into your present setup with as little disruption as possible. Also, if you are still using conventional production methods, you must consider whether employees with these skills should be retrained or replaced.

You must also take into account what training is available and necessary for any new equipment you may purchase. If you are branching out to incorporate services not previously offered, such as scanning or design services, you will probably want to factor in the cost of hiring at least one experienced person for those functions.

Design and Page Makeup

Costly, high-end proprietary workstations are no longer a necessary component of the transition from conventional stripping tables to a digital process. With the advent of powerful software applications, production issues such as stripping, trapping and color management can be handled on the same low-cost Macs or PCs used to create the initial design. This helps bring digital prepress within the reach of the in-plant budget.

A new product from Wright Technologies addresses the whole prepress process from design through color management and imposition with one multifeatured software application called Wright Design. Software applications that address specific production issues include InPosition and Trapper from DK&A and PressWise and TrapWise from Luminous (formerly Adobe).

Image servers from companies such as Agfa, Adobe and Cascade allow for the creation of low-res versions of high-resolution images and automatic swapping of low-res and high-res files for increased network productivity.

Image Capture or Input Devices

With the advent of digital cameras, the old category of input devices has become known as image capture. The range of available camera offerings targets a variety of applications from still-life studio shots to fashion photography.

Products from DuPont, Kodak, Phase One and Sony range from digital backs for existing cameras to full systems complete with software SCSI interface to a computer—often through Adobe Photoshop, for image manipulation and direct connection to a digital color printer for proofing. Features range from eight-bit to 36-bit color, with image sizes up to 8x10˝, resolutions up to 6 million pixels and exposures equivalent to 100 to 800 ISO.

Meanwhile, flatbed and drum scanners are waging their own war, with the consumer as the winner. The old dividing line is disappearing as flatbed developers continue to improve their products and drum scanners drop in price. Flatbed manufacturers have maintained their advantages of low cost and ease of use (no messy mounting to deal with) while improving quality and productivity. Significant additions include the color computer functions that can automatically adjust for highlight, shadow and color correction changes.

On the other hand, the costs of the high-end external drum scanners have dropped as much as 10 to 30 percent due to configuration changes integrating the Macintosh. For in-plants with high volume and multiple shifts, they remain the equipment of choice, as they offer the combination of drum stability and PMT (photomultiplier tube) technology, which can handle a greater dynamic range at higher resolutions than the CCDs (charged coupled devices) used in flatbed scanners.

An innovator in drum scanner technology is ICG, which produces vertical drum scanners with a smaller footprint than traditional drum scanners and uses centrifugal force and media holders to mount media, eliminating the messy oils and tape.

One of the most exciting features from a digital workflow perspective is the CopyDot technology incorporated into Eskofot's line of flatbed CCD scanners. This technology allows screening of color-separated conventional films for integration into electronic page assembly. This means that separated ads, photos or other existing films from conventionally produced jobs can be integrated with digital files to make one comprehensive job file that can be handled digitally for page makeup and output.

Output Devices

The hottest words in output devices are "computer-to-plate." Going directly to plate has come of age with the latest round of platesetters. The technology has matured to the point that several manufacturers now offer superior quality printing plates directly from computer.

One of the newest offerings is the 42T thermal plate unit from Gerber. This new product offers a competitive challenge to traditional platemaking methods, providing high quality, very long run lengths and ease of use. Because thermal plates require no processing, the plate offers the added bonus of environmental compliance.

DuPont, Eskofot, Mitsubishi and Presstek are other companies offering computer-to-plate technologies that support various output media ranging from paper to photopolymer and metal plates. In addition, some of the units can also expose film, helping to bridge the transition from a film environment to a computer-to-plate environment.

In the world of conventional imagesetters, new large-format devices continue to enter the market, playing to the need for output sizes to support the four-up and eight-up imposed pages created in electronic assembly. Improvements in resolution and speed also continue to be made.

Software RIPS (raster image processors) running PostScript Level 2 are also a popular consideration these days, as they offer flexibility, speed and the advantages of being easily upgradable.

Proofing Options

To make a completely filmless, computer-to-plate or direct-to-press workflow a reality for color work requires a digital proofing system that produces acceptable color proofs. Manufacturers are working on that, and several of the continuous-tone dye-sublimation proofers from companies such as Tektronix incorporate color management software. This improves the device's ability to simulate the results of the final output device.

Of course, dye-sub is a more expensive process than thermal wax transfer, so Agfa has introduced an interesting concept in its DuoProof product, which supports a thermal wax mode for fast, intermediate proofs and a dye-sub mode for photographic-quality, continuous-tone proofs. The 3M Rainbow continues to be a popular tabloid dye-sub color proofer.

DuPont offers the Digital Waterproof ink-jet proofer. Designed for computer-to-plate applications and intermediate proofing of conventional film jobs, it supports sizes up to 27x27˝. Encad's NovaJet III, another large-format color ink-jet printer, supports multiple media, from paper and film to canvas and vinyls.

For black-and-white proofing or final output, high-productivity laser printers with resolutions of 1,200 dpi, 1,800 dpi or higher are widely available today at prices that are rapidly becoming more reasonable.

Data Management and Storage

One of the biggest headaches facing those embracing the digital revolution is the problem of data storage. What do you do with those huge files? Where do you store them and how do you move them efficiently through your workflow? That's where storage devices like optical jukeboxes and servers dedicated to image and job management come in.

1996 may well be dubbed "the year of the server," as multiple application servers run on very powerful hardware will provide intelligent one-stop production capabilities incorporating trapping, imposition and RIPing software along with sophisticated data and image management software. These servers will have a dramatic effect on the entire digital prepress workflow.

In addition, improvements will made in the storage capacities of optical drives and removable cartridges, and CD-ROM will increasingly be used as an economical method of transporting data. IPG

This article was supplied by Joe Demharter, vice president of Digital Imaging for Pitman Co., the nation's leading supplier of graphic arts equipment and supplies.