Printing and the printing industry is a very different affair back in the middle of the 20th century when printing engineers Currie and Southward hang out their shingle in Melbourne in 1949.

As the skills shortage continues to bite the print industry, the nation’s biggest trade printer, CMYKhub, has taken matters into its own hands, offering a 
self-developed cadet programme for aspiring staff. Wayne Robinson reports.

Once an essential part of every university in the country, inplants have 
been in retreat from higher education, but are still prevalent in schools, lawyers offices, and in specialist areas such as the ADF. Wayne Robinson assesses the state of play.

If the press is the beating heart of any printing operation, and ink and paper its lifeblood, then software is its DNA – shaping its processes, defining how it all works and ensuring everything develops just so, as Jake Nelson found out from experts.

Much ado is made about hardware in the printing world – we spill plenty of ink on our pages about the latest and greatest presses. Yet without workflow software to efficiently feed them jobs, these shiny new machines may as well be expensive paperweights.

When long-time Fuji Xerox customer Digital Print Australia was looking for an upgrade to its iGen 4, it knew it wanted to stick with its supplier – and fortunately, the Iridesse Production Press provided everything it was looking for.

Printlink – part of Blue Star – won the Supreme Award at the 2019 Pride in Print event, held in the company's home city of Wellington, for its Oranga Tamariki Panels which were entered in the Speciality Products category.

No other sector of the industry has higher barriers to entry or is as capital intensive as web printing. As magazine and newspaper volumes diminish the prospects of a new player entering the lucrative sector are remote.

Nothing beats high-speed web printing for sheer power of performance. Big offset presses, several stories high, pounding through the night turning out massive numbers of printed newspapers.

Mergers and consolidation are redrawing the print landscape. Last year manroland, the German web press manufacturer joined with US-based Goss.

With inkjet making strides into the digital print world, you could be forgiven for thinking dependable old toner is yesterday’s news. Not so, say the big manufacturers, with toner presses still booming – and still innovating. Jake Nelson investigates.

If you’re looking for a new barber, it is said, the best tactic is to find the one the other barbers go to. Little wonder, then, that Guru Labels is so successful – with about 1000 trade customers around the country.

The digital printing space is dominated by three technologies, each with its own strengths and weaknesses: dry toner, liquid toner, and inkjet. Figuring out which one to buy can be a tricky prospect.

Digital inkjet printing has come a long way in the last few years, but can it go all the way and topple litho as the king of print?