Features

Having been impressed with the Jetrix flatbed he tested last year Nessan Cleary went to see if the new roll-to-roll printer would be as good.

Korean company Inktec has built up a good reputation for its Jetrix range of UV-curable printers. Last year Image Reports tested one of the flatbeds and booked a return trip earlier this year when Inktec announced a couple of UV-curable roll-to-roll printers in the run up to Fespa 2015. The RX3200 on test this time around, is a 3.2m wide printer. There’s also a 5m wide version, the RX5000, which was shown on the Jetrix stand at Fespa 2015, though Ben Woodruff, sales manager at Inktec Europe, believes that the 3.2m machine will prove more popular here in the UK.

Esther Butterfield
Sales director
Blink http://www.blink-print.co.uk

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

Blink has recently employed two new staff members to help with growth/sales. They have very diverse backgrounds and skills in print and POS because we feel our clients want to not only be talking to someone that knows how things are done but can actually do them.

Mild green is the answer to that if the responses from the UK’s large-format PSPs to the Image Reports’ Widthwise Survey 2015 are anything to go by. So do the sector’s suppliers feel the same way?

For every large-format PSP with laudable environmental initiatives and practices there are hundreds without. This is not gut feel – extrapolated data from the Widthwise Survey 2015 shows it to be the case. So is this somewhat wishy-washy sectoral attitude reflected by its suppliers? Here we asked a cross section for their current view of the situation and how they expect to move forward in a world where a ‘doing less bad is good’ attitude is becoming increasingly outmoded.

Charlotte Graham-Cumming is a director at Ice Blue Sky, an inbound content marketing agency. She works with CMOs and business owners to help them develop marketing strategies, brand positioning and making the shift to inbound marketing. Here she provides tips on how to best allocate your marketing budget.

PressOn has become a high-profile company within the large-format sector having made a number of ‘firsts’ in terms of kit investment over the last few years, and having taken a decision to make more noise about what it can do. It’s a strategy that has put co-founder Andy Wilson centre stage, but is it paying off? I went to the firm’s new home in Chatham to find out.
By Lesley Simpson

Knowing when to merge and move on is something Graham Clark knows something about, having done it throughout his career, most latterly integrating McKenzie Clark with Icon under Chime Communications parentage. Understanding that bigger can make for better business has been a cornerstone of Clark’s career.

Chris Martin,? country manager for Mactac UK, explains how it’s helping get the message out about the creative potential of printable wide-format media.

Having served the Graphics Industry for over 40 years, Mactac has built its reputation on innovative, reliable products. At the heart of its development strategy is understanding what the end user wants so that it can deliver materials that exploit the company’s knowledge and expertise across its three business units - graphic and decorative products, technical tapes, and label materials.

Stuart Maclaren of Your Print Partner discusses the pros and cons of fabric printing – and why it’s worth taking another look at getting involved.

With Fespa 2015 done and dusted, Nessan Clearly reports on what it highlighted in terms of wide-format inkjet technology development and trends.

Business writer Walter Hale takes a view on its relevance to wide-format PSP diversification.

Don’t believe the hype. We’ve all come across that cliché. It certainly applies to 3D printing - although not in the usual way.

The hype doesn’t come close to conveying the potentially disruptive power of 3D printing. Here is a technology that can make replacement body parts, cars, spare parts for the International Space Station and, in China, 10 new houses in 24 hours.

This kit is an optional addition rather than a printer in its own right, but it’s in an interesting process as Nessan Cleary finds out.

Most printers fit into an easily definable category, such as solvent or UV-curable, but for this month's test we've looked at a hybrid approach. The Colorific Lightbar is based around its UV Light ink, which is effectively a UV-curable ink in a solvent carrier - and thus promises to give the best of both technologies while eliminating their downsides.

Lesley Simpson joined over 300 PSPs in Belgium last month as Agfa attempted to wow them with its scale and scope. Here’s the upshot.