Celebrating Print at Graph Expo

Other Themes on the Show Floor

While not tipping his hand to the actual Must See 'Ems winners, program coordinator Hal Hinderliter provides a taste for some of the other major themes that should dominate the show floor next month:

• Press formats, which were growing exponentially 10 to 15 years ago, are trending back toward half-sizes. Hinderliter anticipates more medium- and small-format offerings for both the press and post-press arenas. Digital offerings, naturally, will continue to impede on analog turf as far as sheet size is concerned. The upshot for shops with both is that much of the post-press equipment geared toward the sheet size is digital/analog agnostic. "We'll see more finishing devices with greater automation, including JDF, which has gone from a pie-in-the-sky idea to something everyone's expecting to have on their devices," Hinderliter notes.
• Short-run production is getting a shot in the arm in the form of tool-less die-cutting, scoring and perforating. Die-free production essentially paves the way toward variable finishing, of sorts. "These systems are making it possible to do one-off production of a certain shape," he says. "In other cases, they're not designed to do one-off, but are capable of doing extremely short-run finishing without the use of expensive and time-consuming setup of the steel rules that we've been used to seeing."
• Quality control and color measurement. Given the increased processing speeds provided by computers, Hinderliter notes that the camera systems inside presses that were once used to monitor registration and color density can now be used for image inspection and defect recognition. In the coming years, this will have a huge bearing on how printers do inspections. "The days of seeing eight to 10 people sitting around a table, sorting through boxes and pulling random samples to check quality are going to disappear," he says. "You'll get that information live, online, as the job is being printed. It's going to be more robust, more effective and, most importantly, be reportable back to the clients. This type of technology is eventually going to become a must-have for all printers."

Along the same lines, color management and measurement moving to the cloud is a hot topic, according to Hinderliter. Cloud-based management enables asynchronous communication of color standards between the brand owners and all of their production partners.