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Spreading the wealth
Recently Adobe has been pushing the concept of rich internet applications and we wondered if this was something that would benefit print service providers. Rich internet applications are all about marrying the kind of unlimited functionality that you can get from most desktop applications with the ubiquity of the Internet. Read More...

Extra-mural job opportunities
Image Reports’ February issue included a story on the giant mural at the Manchester Chill Factor^e centre. This contained a passing reference to an issue of gigabyte-sized imaging that may become more and more important in the next year or so. Read More...

Gesture-based user interfaces
Operating a computer hasn’t changed much since the introduction of the mouse-windows-menu idea 25 years ago. Consumer goodies like the iPhone and the Wii show there’s another way. Simon Eccles looks forward to a change. Read More...

Printing is a transport business too
Printing always will be an industry based on the physical movement of goods, and primarily it uses road transport. Rising fuel prices mean this is getting ever more expensive, even without the guilt trip of global warming to consider. Crude oil prices have tripled in the past couple of years, largely because of demand from China. This hasn’t led to tripling of prices at the forecourts because refinery and tax costs form the majority of the retail prices. Read More...

Xaar maps a future beyond ink: X-jet
Inkjet has now firmly established itself as a viable, flexible digital print technology in key niche markets, particularly in outdoor signage where screen printing has traditionally dominated. It has achieved mainstream adoption and recognition in wide and grand format printing, and in coding and marking, but not yet in the broader commercial print markets that remain dominated by offset litho, flexography or, for variable data, the electrophotographic digital processes. Read More...

Pantone Goe - 2,058 new spot colours, so how will you print them?
A couple of weeks after the news that Pantone is being acquired by X-Rite came the announcement of the first all-new Pantone colour system for 45 years. It’s called Goe and is an entirely separate system to the original Pantone Matching System (PMS), which Pantone claims will also continue to be sold for the foreseeable future. Read More...

Don't bet the store on unsafe storage
Apple and Dell don't realise it yet, but computers aren't very important any more. Not for printing companies anyway. Desktop computers became powerful enough to run Rips and multi-layer Photoshop files around the turn of the century. Read More...

Steve Temple, patent saint of inkjets
Next time you’re filling up your car at a petrol station, look down. If you see the manhole covers that the tanker drivers use, chances are that they were made using a 3D glass fibre weaving technique invented by Steve Temple, better known as the technical director of Xaar, Cambridge’s pioneering printhead developer. Read More...

Digital books can counter the China syndrome
On the face of it, digital book printing ought to tick so many boxes that it’s a foregone conclusion for all but best-sellers. But it ain’t necessarily so. To big publishers the price per unit is the be-all and end-all. This means long runs printed on litho presses, producing big batches that are warehoused until they are sold, and which are subject to returns from bookshops that are then wastefully scrapped. Read More...

Printin' talkin' blues. Or pinks and oranges
Colour. Dogs can’t see it. Humans can, even if Americans can’t spell it properly, but it’s hard to describe objectively because a lot of it is a sensation that’s processed inside the brain. Any child can name a huge range of colours, but describing and defining colour in non-subjective or non-comparative terms is surprisingly difficult. Read More...

Get ready for the speed demons
Lenticular imaging for 3D and animation effects goes in and out of fashion, but it’s proving particularly suited to UV flatbed printers that can print directly onto the plastic lens material. There’s even a system that does away with lenses altogether now. Simon Eccles takes a stereoscopic look. Read More...

How to add a new dimension to your print
Lenticular imaging for 3D and animation effects goes in and out of fashion, but it’s proving particularly suited to UV flatbed printers that can print directly onto the plastic lens material. There’s even a system that does away with lenses altogether now. Simon Eccles takes a stereoscopic look. Read More...

Future displays: your flexible friend or the death of print?
Every year or so we are promised the next generation of 'paper-like' flexible displays, also known as e-paper, that are going to revolutionise portable computing and wipe out those boring old printed books. Finally it's time to suspend disbelief, because it looks like something's actually on the way. Read More...

Print takes on a whole new dimension
Imagine using an inkjet to print solid objects in full colour. A few years ago this would have been the stuff of blue-sky articles in ‘Popular Mechanics.’ Today it’s not only technically possible, but fully available: you can slap down £25,000 on ArtSystems’ counter today and they’ll wrap it up a Z Corporation ZPrinter 450 and deliver it. Read More...