Print Buying Direct

Pre-press – 20 years of change – part 12 – 27th March 2009

Automation and quality control

By 2002, JDF implementations were being delivered and process automation started to demonstrate real financial returns. The general computing market was also not standing still, with flat panel LCD screens coming onto market and Apple’s introduction of the iMac. This was the first computer since the original Mac to be a computing appliance, with screen, cpu, subsytems and rives all in a single unit and market Apple’s return to favour in the graphics industry. Tablet PCs also came onto the market, but had little impact on pre-press. The pre-press industry was preoccupied with wrestling with standards and struggling to indentify viable cross-channel business models.

That the content market was splintering was clear with Adobe’s introduction in 2003 of Acrobat 6. This was the first time Acrobat was available in several versions tailored to consumer, office and professional print markets. Elsewhere in pre-press, consolation was rife with numerous acquisitions: EFI acquired Best, Konica bought Minolta, Agfa acquired Dotrix from Barco and took over Esko’s newspaper interests, having acquired Autologiv a couple of years previously, and Kodak bought Scitex Digital Printing for its Versamark technology. That year Enfocus released CertifiedPDF.net to provide online and automated preflight checking services, and the European court ruled that colour can be copyrighted. This passed without much fuss at the time, but it reinforced the importance for accurate digital colour management. T/R Systems, later acquired by EFI, introduced Digital Store Front. Under EFI’s stewardship this technology has gone on to become the leading web to print technology on the market. Xerox also sold its 100th iGen3 which it had introduced in 2002.

Quality control was becoming a key competitive advantage for pre-press service providers and printers and there was much work underway to help them achieve it. In 2004, ISO 12647 which defined a standard set of printing conditions for the various processes used for print production, was published and the UK’s Periodical Publishers Association went live with its Pass4press automated pre-flight checking tool, based on Markzware’s FlightCheck software. The industry shifts that had started in 1989 continued, with a major restructuring announced for Fujifilm, Goss taking over Heidelberg’s web interests and Kodak its share of Nexpress, and Presstek acquiring the UK’s AB Dick.

Xerox FreeFlow Digital Workflow Collection, which was based on open standards, was introduced in 2003. This comprehensive collection of Xerox digital printing products, services and tools was an early example of umbrella brands that incorporate a constantly shifting array of components that can be tailored to suit different business and customer needs. FreeFlow and its sophisticated toolset confirmed Xerox as a serious player for graphic arts workflow management.

A year of birthdays- 2005. John Crosfield, a founding father of digital colour pre-press, celebrated his 90th birthday and Heidelberg UK turned 30. Apple unveiled a version of its operating system running on Intel processors. Again the year was marked with acquisitions as Kodak acquired Creo, Fujifilm took over Sericol, Screen bought Inca and HP acquired Scitex Vision. Progress towards process less platesetting continued, with Agfa announcing its first UK customer for the: Azura chemistry free plate. And the industry welcomed a new major player when Canon introduced the ImagePress, marking the companies’ entry into the professional graphic arts business.

When JDF 1.3 was published and the hype surrounding it rampant, we all sort of missed the point. We got the automation message, but we misunderstood the importance of technologies and standards coming into pre-press from beyond our industry, and which JDF would necessarily have to support. Xeikon was one of a handful of developers who understood this and introduced the digital printing industry’s’ first IPDS controller, for outputting transactional data on a high quality colour press. The Adobe PDF Print Engine, also previewed in 2005, marked the shift away from PostScript to PDF, a data format that offered considerably more scope for incorporating other data formats into a single output stream than PostScript ever could. But adobe’s foresight was not limitless, and it poured scorn onto Microsoft’s introduction XPS, the XML Paper Specification that is the underlying imaging model for Microsoft Vista also launched in 2005.

To be continued…

See Part one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten and eleven of this blog – Pre-press – 20 years of change

See Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6 of our blogs on Direct Mail and Transactional Print

School Prospectus Made Easy and Print Buying Direct are trading names of The Printing House Ltd. The Print Buying Direct brand was originally set up to protect the quality name of The Printing House of Crewe and Nantwich, Cheshire, Uk – recognised throught the North of England as a quality printers. Now Print Buying Direct has established itself over the last two years and has become a quality brand in its own right with very competitive prices nationally. We hope that School Prospectus Made Easy will follow in the same fashion and become a popular brand in its own right.

Print Buying Direct is one of the Uk’s leading suppliers of graphic design and print, based in the Crewe and Nantwich area of Cheshire (UK) but supplying all of the UK & Ireland. See our websites for more information on graphic design, brochures, business cards, appointment cards, leaflets, flyers, pamphlets, posters etc

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For more information please see our websites – especially our Printing Glossary – Printing A to Z – this makes a really useful guide for designers, printers, print buyers, college students etc.

Don’t forget The Printing House also specialise in Printing for Schools, especially School Prospectus, Secondary School Prospectus, College Prospectus, Primary School Prospectus & Sixth Form Prospectus. We have a vast range of experience design and print of primary, secondary, 6th form, college and universtity prospectus. Visit our School Prospectus Made Easy website to see examples of our work and more about our products. Our customer testimonials webpage is constantly being added to – please stop by and see our reviews.

Tags: appointment cards, Brochures, Business Cards, Flyers, graphic design, Leaflets, Pamphlets, Posters, Pre-press, Print Buying Direct, school prospectus

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