Who gives a rat's? - Print 21 magazine article

2008 is the Year of the Rat in the Chinese calendar and a year for renewal, fresh starts and - product launches. With whiskers a-twitching and a nose for sniffing out the faintest aroma of change, Andy McCourt presents eight things to look out for this year.

Getting shot down in flames for making cliff-edge predictions that may be uncomfortable for some people is a risk I have taken many times in 22 years of research, writing and presenting in the graphic arts industry. It's not something I do to annoy and stir up; I believe we must get our heads out of the sand and be fully aware of what influences the various sectors that make up the graphic communications business in order to future-proof ourselves.

Neither have I always been 100 percent on-target. In 1987 I studied the first commercial digital camera, the Sony Mavica, at ANPA in the USA and came away convinced that film, scanning and prepress as we knew it had five years life left in it at the most. Well, it happened but has taken 20 years so I get the booby prize, but in a way I have no regrets because the most important aspect of futurism is to be prepared for it, not to predict it. 'I told you so' is a useless phrase and demonstrates a failure to show, as well as tell.

So here goes with my 'Ratpicks' for the year of the Rat. It's appropriate that we chose the Chinese lunar calendar as symbolism since that country is so much on the ascendancy. India too, where the same animal calendar is widely used.

1) Super-greening of the printing industry
If you thought the limits of 'greening' our industry had been reached - think again. 2008 will see immense pressures to further reduce emissions, water usage, VOCs, and the most visible of our alleged sins - wasted paper. The most prolific cause of wasted (as opposed to waste) paper is over-production of non-targeted printed products. Shotgun blasts of hopeful marketing pieces with little if any demographic input. It's an echo of the mass-market 'big bang' consumerism of post-war years. The producers of this type of printing will either be made accountable for its recycling, or will be forced to move further to short-run, targeted, on-demand non-wasteful models. Super-greening will not be purely a 'top-down' initiative born of legislation. Major corporate print buyers will be saying 'show us your green credentials' and if you don't have any, you won't get the work.

2) Processless violet plates
Previewed at IPEX 2006, it seems full-steam ahead for Agfa and Fuji with violet-imaged plates that require no chemical processing, just a water wash-out to remove a preservative gum. Agfa already has controlled-sales beta sites in the newspaper sector while Fujifilm is citing a drupa May 2008 launch for its Brillia HD Pro-V chemistry-free violet plate. The promise of processless violet plates is one of less expensive plates and platesetters since they should image on most installed 400-410nm wavelength violet platesetters. It remains to be seen if this will portend the demise of thermally-imaged plates as most users of them sing their praises. Other aspects to consider are: what power laser is required to satisfactorily image the violet plates and is it really processless or just chemistry-free?

3) Plummeting cost of digital colour
Always a controversial topic since 40-50 cents per A4 colour sheet is considered de rigueur by many digital print operators but 2008's pricing will be down to improved production efficiencies, not customer pressure. In fact, Xerox is already touting its 8860 30ppm Phaser colour printer as 'colour output for the price of black and white.' But that's the office market. New digital presses like the Océ JetStream (up to 2,052 A4ppm @ 600 x 600dpi inkjet) and ColorStream 10000 (up to 172 A4ppm, toner-based higher resolution) and no doubt offerings from Xerox, Canon, Kodak and the like will drive cost-per-digital page down. Which leads me to ...

4) Digital presses at offset litho speeds
Speaking of the new Océ Jeststream 2200, in its two-tower configuration, it's rated at 2,052 A4 full-colour pages per minute. That's 123,120 A4s per hour. Divide by 8 to compare with an 8-up imposition on a B1 offset press and you have 15,390 A1 sheets per hour equivalent. That's as fast as the latest Speedmasters! Okay, we're talking two-up duplexed on a web and lower resolution but the results are plenty good enough for 'trans-promo' print, direct mail and maybe even newsprint. Kodak will preview its fast Stream inkjet (continuous-droplet versus drop on demand) technology at drupa and even toner-king Xerox has signaled its move into inkjet. A new UK company, Inkski, is developing ink droplet (not jet) printing that can operate at faster speeds than the fastest web offset press. Not everyone needs speed - 65ppm is enough for most SME digital printers, but it's a trend and one that could shake the foundations of, first, the flexo and in many years, the litho offset market.

5) Digital paper's great leap forward
For years we have heard about e-paper, digital paper, e-book readers and so forth, with little impact on the printing industry. Cost, content and flexibility have been big issues but all this is about to change as electronics companies race to see who can be first to commercialise thin, portable displays. One year ago, a Cambridge University spin-off company (as is Inkski), Plastic Logic, raised $100 million to commercialise its active-matrix displays that offer 'take anywhere, read anywhere' flexibility and 'enable a reading experience closer to paper than any other technology.' A huge production plant is under construction in Dresden, Germany, and it plans to make a million thin flexible displays a year. Plastic electronics use polymers instead of silicon, so are cheaper, more versatile and above all flexible. <www.plasticlogic.co.uk>. Will they be at drupa?

6) Last drupa for graphic arts film
In 1998 I addressed a GASAA post-IPEX gathering at the Kirribilli ex-Services Club in North Sydney. As a result of what I'd seen and heard at IPEX (or not seen - there were no new film imagesetters on show), I suggested that we would see the end of silver-halide film use in the printing industry by 2010. I'm basically sticking to that prediction. By drupa 2012, in all but perhaps screen printing and parts of flexography, we will no longer use film and it will be unviable to mass-produce for the likes of Kodak, Fujifilm and Agfa. Kodak has already imploded film production plants in Rochester and other places. The biggest barrier to the efficiencies of an all-digital workflow is where it is interrupted for an analogue process. Film was such an interruption and, one day in the far future, plates will be regarded as such too.

7) A local company to watch - Wellcom Group
Remember the Sidwell family of Show-Ads Omega fame? Since Show-Ads was swallowed up inside the PMP corpus maximus, Wayne Sidwell has been steadily building a dynamic company with strong links to corporate and retail brand managers who need pre-media digital asset 'brand custodians' to manage their priceless brands across several media platforms including print. Wellcom was started in 2000 and floated on the ASX in 2005. Its FY 2007 revenue was up 56.5 percent to $53 million over 06 and 08 looks just as promising. Wellcom owns presses, both digital and offset. It operates the only KBA Karat 74s in Australia plus an HP Indigo 5000. It owns 50 percent of Cadillac Offset in South Australia, a major heatset web offset printer with the other 50 percent owned by Wayne Sidwell's private company. It operates Heidelberg presses in Queensland by virtue of its acquisition of Image Studios, has opened up in NZ and moved into the UK market last October by buying Keene's Repro. Now, if a scratch start-up can kick off eight years ago and create a profitable, growing group that focuses on pre-media, graphic arts and print - what really is the problem in our industry? Wellcom has shown the way forward and will continue to do so. <www.wellcom.com.au>

8) Even more print management
If you're a printer who is still bemoaning the ascendancy of print management companies...get ready for more, but different. Everyone wants in on the act. Overseas, TNT - Peter Abeles's old courier company now a Dutch-owned conglomerate - has signaled its intention to get into print management. Germany's Deutsche Post is already in it. Some may say our own Australia Post is flirting with the idea. A brilliant UK firm that began by offering web offset quotes on the world wide has started www.freeprintmanagement.com - try it, you get an instant estimate and great pricing and it's going global. Why is this happening? The answer is service; the PMCs recognise that what print buyers want is service not merely production of a product. The concept of passionate, no-compromise service has seemed foreign to so many printers for so many years, and that's why they're losing it to PMCs. The light on the horizon could be services such as freeprintmanagment.com - because it is more on the printer's side. Even Britain's equivalent to our PIAA, the BPIF, endorses it.

That's my eight for '08. There are more exciting things happening, of course, and with drupa in May, probably some we don't even know about. Without making a ninth Ratpick, 2008 is the last year of Heidelberg's no-compete agreement with Kodak regarding digital presses. I wonder what digital strategy Heidelberg will have for 2009, leading into IPEX 2010 and drupa 2012?