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.

Data from a new Smithers Pira report – The Future of Digital Textile Printing to 2023 – shows that in four years time digital textile printing will virtually double to €4.9bn, presenting major opportunity for print businesses.

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.

Print environmentalist analyst Laurel Brunner says there are serious ecological reasons that will drive the move into digital textile printing.

A New Zealand wide-format trade printer has seen a big boost to its quality and productivity after installing a new EFI Vutek FabriVu 340 UV-LED printer, supplied by Starleaton – a difference like “night and day”, says the team.

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.

The wide-format digital textiles market is largely a four-cornered fight between different technologies: dye sublimation, UV, direct-to-textile, and Latex.

Research agency Smithers Pira says there are four major trends that are helping to grow the décor print market.

As digital technology advances into the textile printing market, however, the rise of direct-to-garment (DTG) solutions opened up new opportunities that commercial printers never had before –and now is a good time to jump aboard the bandwagon

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.