Letters, feedback, get it off your chest: 26 November 2008

Readers have their say over recent news.

Re: Busy presses allow PMP to knock back low-margin work

Congratulations to PMP on their apparent "testicular fortitude". Whatever the facts; perhaps if there were more "declining" of work due to low prices supposedly being offered by competitors (and how often to we see actual proof of those prices), the local printing industry may be in a better and more profitable position.
 
John Horsley
Expression Printing Group Pty Ltd

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Re: Kodak chases counterfeiting crooks

I read with interest your article on colour shifting inks. Kodak's Traceless has been around for quite a few years but seems to be prohibited by the expensive readers and proprietory consumable. I understand that Merck KGaA supply the inks and that the reader is there just to authenticate. It seems that these technologies are searching for a problem and market rather than the other way around!
 
It is also interesting that this product is not marketed in the world's largest counterfeight geographical area – China. Why would you not market a product into the largest market with the greatest potential, is this because it is not secure or more expensive to implement than the product it is trying to protect? In a year when China has suffered terribly with problems in the dairy food chain I would have thought this would be a good opportunity if the product can stand up?
 
In my experience security solutions mainly have to be overt (look at bank notes!), if tag and trace is to be a success then it has to be cost effective in the consumables and in the decoder. So far, either thermocratic inks (a little bit expensive on the consumables) with a cheaper decoder (typically your thumb!) or, optical decoders with standard inks will be the future of tag and trace technologies.
 
Dr. Chin TuFat [sic]

Re: NSW Premier pushes print aside for online advertising 

I think that the Premier is missing the point – older Australians are more likely to read a paper - printed material. How is he going to do his on-line advertising ? Where will people find it? Will they have to go to websites of that particular body?

Fiona Brackenbury

 

Re: Lindsay Yates woos big city clients with rebranding

It's as if fate prepared the page-layout for this week's Pint21online – neatly juxtaposed like Ying and Yang, were two good news/bad news stories.

The "bad" one was the NSW Government's edict to reduce print advertising in favour of on-line.

The "good" one was the story about Lindsay Yates taking a pro-active initiative, and projecting themselves out into the marketplace, in a rare example of self-promotion.

Rare, in the sense that as an industry we've never had to do much in the way of marketing. It would be very interesting to try and recall what have been some of the big, self-promotional events staged by printing companies over the last decade? Certainly Lilyfield's ground-breaking effort to mark their move "out to the sticks" was an epochal event, as was Rapid Digital's extraordinary "smoke and mirrors" event to mark their acquisition of not one, but two huge digital devices.

These events don't just happen and aren't cheap (feeding a bunch of hungry/thirsty inebriates is never going to be a cheap exercise), but not only do they promote the individual company, these events also send a signal out to the business community that printing is alive and well, and "out there".

Let companies be encouraged to undertake these events. How? Through the print awards of course!

We already have a category called "Self-Promotion" – why restrict it to purely the printed page? Why not think laterally and reward "good behaviour", ie, self-promoting events which elevate the profile of the entire printing industry?

We move in exciting times – we have to keep up, and staging such events is very much part of that process. Well done.

James Cryer

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Re: Offset Alpine achieves ISO certification

This article is hardly newsworthy. Webstar have been ISO 12647-2 accredited for some months now (through Printspec), and although it is good to see OAP keeping up with industry developments, I would have thought an article explaining where the industry is at with ISO implementation and the benefits for printers, publishers and clients would be of greater interest.

Mark Rolls
Webstar Print