Features

Is there now a secondhand market for UV flatbeds? Graham Thompson, MD supplier Matoria says there is.

Can it pay for PSPs to offer customer loyalty programmes, especially ones that provide gifts and offers as well as a dedicated support service? Pixartprinting sales and marketing director Andrea Pizzola thinks so.

Nathan Atkins, managing director of Papergraphics, talks about relationship building for creative exploration.

Personalisation is currently one of the hottest topics in the print industry. Whether you’re targeting consumers or businesses, personalised merchandise, apparel and textiles present great opportunities. We’re particularly excited by the commercial interiors market and how printers, designers and even artists can work together to create truly unique environments. However, as with any industry, to be successful you need to have a good understanding of how to get the most from emerging trends.

If it’s the end of the year it’s time to announce the Angel Awards. Each year Image Reports picks products introduced to the UK during the last year, and considered by the editorial team as innovative and likely to impact the wide-format sector. The accolades this year go to…

Management information systems have a certain reputation among some large-format PSPs for failing to meet the sector’s specific needs. Image Reports asked four MIS providers some of the key questions PSPs regularly pose.

How automated do you want you workflow? Walter Hale takes a look at robotic technology trends and where it may lead you.

Robot is a curious word. First used by Czech playwright Karel Capek in his 1920 science fiction drama R.U.R, it was actually suggested by his brother Josef, a painter and writer. Karel had wanted to call his factory made artificial creations labori (from the Latin word labor) but he didn’t like the word. Josef suggested robot – robota was a Czech word that meant slave labour, drudgery or hard work. Karel liked the sound of that and it stuck, with him and us. R.U.R. stood for Rossum’s Universal Robots but in the near century since, robotics have been far from universal. In 1959, computer-assisted manufacturing was demonstrated for the first time by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

At 3.2m wide, this is one of the biggest wide-format machines to offer LED curing at a speed suitable for high-volume production environments. Nessan Cleary puts it through it’s paces.

LED curing is becoming increasingly common, particularly amongst smaller printers though many people doubt that it can be used with the bigger, more productive machines. So EFI caused a stir when it first announced the 3.2m wide GS3250LX, one of the biggest UV wide format printers to use LED curing. With around a hundred already installed in the UK, it's obviously proving popular.

This winter, Image Reports brought together five PSPs with very different backgrounds and strategies to discuss the state of the wide-format industry, as revealed in our Widthwise Report, and the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead in 2016

Franc Moscato
Owner, DGS Supplies
http://www.dgssupplies.co.uk

What’s having the greatest impact on your business at the moment?

We like to offer the personal touch to all of our customers, large and small, combining both old fashioned courtesy with the resources to deliver on time.

VW’s troubles may look like a one-of-a-kind disaster but, Walter Hale suggests, there’s a lesson there for every print business.

It’s too easy to see the VW affair as a plain and simple corporate fraud. Yet as Gregory Unruh, a professor at George Mason University in Virginia - one of the world’s leading authorities on sustainability says, the reason that the car maker cheated should make every business leader stop and think: “The underlying cause was that VW’s chosen technology, the diesel engine, failed to meet 21st century sustainability standards in key markets.” As he puts it, “VW is discovering a stark, Darwinian reality: sustainability kills.”

Gavin Wall, a solicitor and licensed conveyancer, and director and the lead commercial property lawyer in Conveyancing Expert, helps you navigate business premises leasehold pitfalls when moving location.

In September upholstery specialist Anthony Devine came to daytime TV watchers’ attention via an appearance on BBC1 TV programme ‘Money for Nothing’, in which he was seen working on a reupholstery job using his own photography to create imagery for bespoke, digitally printed fabric used to revamp a sofa.