Everyone has to change eventually and the unequivocal digital focus at last week's PacPrint13 trade show in Melbourne provided a lucid reminder that the future of the print industry in Australia is already here. Andy McCourt investigates the nature of the changing landscape.
This has been the pivotal PacPrint; we’ve spun on a zac. We’re digital – wholly or partially - from now on. I take nothing away from the non-digital processes; in fact quite the opposite: huge accolades to companies such as Cyber for having the only two offset presses at the show (both sold) and to Aldus Engineering for its masterful presentation of the Mark Andy P7 narrow web flexo system. But even these two types of press that happen to still ‘press’ ink onto substrates using plates benefit from digital technologies.
Offset and Flexo automation are all-digital in their heritage. CtP is a digital process born from Raster Image Processing. The Mark Andy Performance P7 is replete with digital controls for web tension, multiple servos and registration. Who cares if the ink goes down from a plate and not an OPC or inkjet head? I don’t.
With bindery and finishing, digital controls and touch-screens are now mandatory. The folding, creasing, binding and even laminating may be executed in a mechanical or analogue way but the modernisation is thanks to digital. Whatever legacy technologies are in our industry – fewer after the Geon auction took place while PacPrint was on – and whatever modern replacements are installed for high volume and speciality offset, flexo, gravure and screen processes; PacPrint 2013 was pivotal in redefining our industry as digital in varying degrees at all levels.
Together with Visual Impact, PacPrint2013, as noted by publisher Patrick Howard, was probably the best and most comprehensive showcase of digital printing, finishing and online technologies anywhere in the world. ChinaPrint closed its doors just a few days before PacPrint started but, although massive and successful, it still reflected the analogue nature of Asian printing, which should be no surprise when you look at their volumes.
It was not just about toner and inkjet digital printing. PacPrint’s underlying secret message was to be found on stands like Pent Net, Accura/Ideal Solutions and EFI where online digital buying models can be a ‘business in a box’. Web-to-Print is not just about advertising for business on the internet; if you move your customers to customised online ordering and archive their templates and digital assets; your profitability from those customers increases.
Pent Net can even set up a W2P system where jobs are ordered 24/7, sent directly to the appropriate output device (mono, colour, wide format etc), printed and finished if inline finishing is attached and ready for dispatch without human intervention. You can turn up for work at 7am and find a pile of jobs already for checking and sending, complete with job ticket and costed invoice or confirmation of pre-payment. CMYKhub can even set you up in a W2P online storefront at no cost.
The next stage is complete mobile print ordering. Already iPads and other tablet devices can be used in the same way as the office PC or laptop. This way, print embeds itself with the online and mobile world and does not appear quite so archaic and uncool.
That all of the ‘big iron’ presses were sold at PacPrint – Cyber’s eight colour Ryobi A1 and also the A3 plus Aldus Engineering’s Mark Andy P7 label press (pictured); should be no surprise because such vendors coming into a 
digital show with higher volume solutions that use digital benefits for analogue output are sure to attract custom. Those who were not there missed out on a huge opportunity to declare their relevance to over 13,000 visitors.
The sheer weight of digital on Ricoh, Lanier, Screen, Fuji Xerox and Fujifilm, Konica Minolta, Xeikon, Canon, Kodak, Agfa, Currie Group, HP and all of VIEE is testimony to our ‘future history’. The offset print megafactories of the world are mostly in China today; we can not change that. But we can adapt to the shift in geo-commerce by thinking and being digital at every level.
A respected sizeable offset printer greeted me in an aisle of PacPrint and asked: “We are looking at digital cut-sheet but is that market now saturated?” It was a great question and I burbled out some kind of answer. Deeper thought tells me no; saturation occurred when the industry kept loading up factory floors with ultra high-speed and highly automated major press systems that caused pricing wars just to keep them running. It was a foolish race to the bottom. While we will always have the need for efficient and productive offset and flexo sites; Australia and New Zealand by nature are predisposed markets for digital – shorter runs, fast delivery.
Digital facilitates fragmentation and history shows that most industries past their growth peak tend to fragment. Smaller, healthy, local digital print businesses thinking short runs and fast turn-arounds are Drake’s nifty corvettes against the lumbering Armada. Manoeuvrable and swift, they can adapt to market conditions and develop new tactics as they think on their feet.
Finishing devices are increasingly designed and manufactured with digital in mind, from both cost and productivity angles. FAB Equipment featured several binders, booklet makers, punchers – all geared to digital volumes but capable of finishing offset work too. The same company has signed up the Delphax elan 500 agency and will begin sales early in 2014 of this 500 ppm SRA2 digital press, powered by Memjet technology.
Rapid Packaging Systems added the D2 digital finisher and R2 rewinder (R2D2 – was Luke Skywalker involved?), to its X2 Memjet label press and sold the whole line to Aldine Printers of Cairns, with more sure to follow.
At the faster end of digital labels; SCREEN with its dealer partner Jet Technologies held serious talks with several label printers about the Truepress Jet L350UV – receiving its commercial-version world premiere at PacPrint and awarded one of Print21’s ‘Hot Picks.’ And yet Jet Technologies took an order for a SCREEN PlateRite FX870II Flexo CTP setter – that will mostly be used to make Letterpress plates at Signature Labels. Such is the beautiful scope of our industry.
We’ll never be the same as an industry after this PacPrint. If we are by the time PrintEx comes around in 2015, we will be in trouble. Everyone has to change – print businesses, associations, training establishments and individuals. The incontrovertible evidence was there for all to see at the Melbourne Exhibition Centre.