A lot of Digital toys, but not much for Offset

Graph Expo is the premier printing & graphics show held at McCormick Place in Chicago every year. It’s the hot spot to see whats new & revelant in our industry.

So we headed to Chi-Town last week, and found some interesting happenings: Graph Expo 2010 had a lot more quiet, eerie sound than in the past. Missing was the sound of full dressed 6 color and 8 color offset presses running at full speed (no Heidelberg or Komori), and although there was some bindery equipment there, it did not dominate by any means. What everybody has talked about for years has happened, the graphics and print show has gone digital. Now I didn’t walk the whole the whole floor to every booth, so I don’t have the official overall view, but it was very obvious that the big press vendors did not see it in their best interest to spend the cash to bring the big metal in, and all the software and high tech stuff did.

What was hot was wide format and digital printing, variable data, cross media, work flows and so on. I guess you could call it the Print and Graphic digital technology show. I think the next 3 to 5 years will usher in a sea of change as printers change their focus from traditional printing to a business model that contains lots of new products and services, from signage, to 1 to 1 marketing and a whole lot in between. Our favorite destinations were:

• Efi (Electronics for imaging), who makes both Fiery Rips for digital print and MIS Solutions for graphics industry
• Cannon, wide format ink jet solutions, among everything else Cannon does
• Epson, all sizes of ink jet printers and proofers
• Xitron, the Work Flow and Rip that we use in our prepress. Love these folks.
• Easy Purl and MindFire, 1 to 1 direct marketing tools through web based, licensed software for Purls (Personalized URL’s) and QR (Quick Response) Codes
• Direct Smile, variable data & image print solutions
• XMPie (A Xerox company), 1 to 1 marketing solutions that tie all the above  into an integrated adobe CS5 plug in. We were really impressed with this one.

A great thing about these shows is meeting & talking with your peers from around the country. We did some hanging out with Brad & Todd Warren, who own MPI Printing of Louisville, and a Sal Passasoni, a consulting engineer from Florida for Mac Prepress. After hanging with these guys all day (+ dinner and some cocktails) as well as talking to everybody at the above booths, we digested an awful lot, (plus shared a lot)  about how jobs can go through all of our shops faster, cleaner and more accurate (plus we got to pick on Ron Teller of Efi Printsmith at their booth. How’s that demo doin’ Ron?)

And of course Chicago is such a cool city, we walked around a while, found a cool Irish Pub on Rush Street, had a great dinner a the Tilted Kilt and got up early Monday and went to the top of the John Hancock building. And of course, there was the taxie driver who couldn’t speak english and his cab just died in the middle of the street, I think that was profanity in another language. I’ll save that for another time.

A few sights

Once again, we made the trek to Chicago for the annual Print Expo at McCormic Place. There were a lot of vendors there this year (probably more vendors than attendee’s), and it’s just kind of impossible to say that there was any one big ground breaking thing that we saw. Probably the biggest overall theme was automation through out the whole printing process. The other thing that I learned was that the Mike Ditka’s restaurant signature steak is a 22 oz Ribeye (I didn’t get one though, that’s just too over the top). Chicago can be such a blast.

The crowd was very light this year, so much so that you could talk to any vendor you wanted to and usually get them to do a demo of whatever they were selling. That was good for us, but tough for the vendors. I was trying not to make eye contact with vendors I did not want to talk to, cause if they get the eye contact thing going, there’re all over you.

We started by going to EFI’s booth, who owns Printsmith & Fiery (Printsmith & Fiery process a lot of information in our company). Once again, the theme was automation throughout the whole shop. What we saw confirmed that over the next couple of years, we should be able to really lift the level of the On Line services we offer, like tracking orders on-line &  pushing account history to the web, as well as back room enhancements to make the whole system work better. Of course they are selling outcomes, and all of this automation takes a lot of work & training on our behalf. We are trying to picture what our shop (and the industry) will look like in 2011 and beyond.

We also went to Xitron’s booth (we just purchased their workflow), and they had an incredible add on to our workflow for uploading any file over the internet and having it converted to a Certified PDFx proof while you wait. That actually made a lot of sense to me for cutting down on preflighting and proofing time.

Heidelberg had some incredibly automated machines that are cool to look at, but I think they are having a hard time moving their million dollar + presses, cutters & folders in this market. Heidelberg has the capability to completely automate a print shop (Oregon is a Heidelberg shop), but you could spend a lot of money doing that. The trick is to focus their best features that apply to a shop like ours and leave the rest behind. Unfortunately, I think their sales people in that 3 acre booth out numbered attendee’s 2:1.

At the Xante both, they were showing a full color printer for envelopes that added variable capabilities. I had heard about it and was afraid it would be something that would break after a year, but I was actually pretty impressed with how simple but effective it was. Think of the variable data and messages you could put on #10 envelopes (in full color) in this upcoming 2010 election season.

My friend John Chabut (Stewart Industries), makers of PMI High Die Cutters had a booth showing one of their  models . A “High Die Cutter” is a specialized die cutter for labels and things you want a very “clean” cut on (think of a beer bottle label). I was impressed to hear thats what 4/Over uses to die cut out their round cornered business cards…Kudos on that one John!

There was a lot of wide format printing, a lot of Web-to-Print applications and a lot of cool bindery applications…I just got the feeling that nobody was spending any real money. I think mostly people are waiting to see which way the economy goes and also waiting to see how many of these high tech promises really pan out.