News
| Saturday, 01 November 2008 13:23 |
A word from the wise Inkjet!Is it worth forking out the equivalent to $75 for Frank J. Romano’s update on the inkjet scene?Briefly, Inkjet! promises to tell you “everything you want to know about inkjet in one handy book… history, technology, markets and applications”. And no-one on this earth is better placed to tell that story than Romano. He has founded eight magazines, written 42 books and his depth and breadth of vision have helped make him a superbly effective professor in the school of print media at the Rochester Institute of Technology. And inkjet would probably be one of Romano’s specialist subjects if he ever appeared on Mastermind. The technology is, as he notes, “the overnight sensation that took almost forty years”. Romano is clearly an enthusiast, describing inkjet as “the almost perfect printing process – if done correctly. There is no image carrier, no makeready, instant drying, and integrated finishing.” Such fervour is based on what Romano identifies as seven core strengths: less complexity, potential for spot colour, absence of makeready, scalability (the technology used to print can also be used to proof in customers’ offices), lower power needs, less environmental impact and cheaper ink (compared to toner). His conviction that inkjet is a technology whose time has come permeates the book, underpinned by his knowledge of suppliers’ research and illustrated with countless tables and graphs that project the future. Flicking through, you find prognostications about everything from the likelihood of using inkjets to print out copies of newspapers in small runs at airports to the rivalry between toner and inkjet, and the use of nanotechnology to create inks that don’t clog nozzle heads in inkjet printers. The depth of Romano’s enthusiasm is impressive because he is no neophyte. He has been watching technological revolutions come and go for 40 years. As he told a conference a few years ago, “In 1983 a company called Wang Labs produced a system that could scan images and store them in memory. They predicted paperless offices. Today, offices are Wangless.” For wide-format printers, the meat of the book is a lengthy chapter analysing the technological destiny of wide-format suppliers, a detailed exploration of inkjet technology which suggests that, by 2015, it will offer a good ROI compared to conventional printing presses and a peek into future drivers and trends. As you flick through, you might want to have a pack of Post-Its handy, as the book is full of nuggets, such as the revelation that scientists at the University of Illinois have successfully trialled nano-scale printing nozzles which could achieve resolutions of 100,000dpi but is, Romano estimates, some five to ten years away from real-world commercial realisation. Looking ahead, Romano weighs up the growth of roll-fed inkjet presses (which he predicts will at some point account for about half of the market), the prospects for the hybrid traditional offset/variable printing machines being developed by Kodak and Muller Martini and the likelihood of digital having a larger market share than offset (something which he expects to happen by 2015). If Romano’s book has a fault, it is a small and, given the compass of the book, inevitable one. The focus on technology is illuminating, exhilarating and yet, ultimately, limiting. Though Romano does consider the markets for inkjet in detail and with insight, the end user remains a marginal figure throughout the book. Inkjet will prosper or not on its ability to help companies do something that, at some point, consumers will be willing to pay for. And the biggest criticism of this book – ironic, given the name of this section of the magazine – is that is lacks a sense of zeitgeist, a vision of what is driving or changing our behaviour and how much that might change what inkjet and wide-format will have to deliver. But such caveats aside, this is an enlightening tour de force, full of lucid insight, intriguing research and sane projections about the future. As such it is worth $75 – or whatever the equivalent in sterling is when you read this – of anyone’s money. To buy it go online at www.gain.net 
Share Link: 
|
