Print Buying Direct

Everything you need to know about Digital Printing – part 13 – 21st July 2009
Wide format inkjets
The development of the wide format printer into a significant market presence has happened almost entirely within the past 20 years. Before that in the 1980s there were a handful of very low resolution spray systems developed mainly for metro station billboards and similar. More widely used were liquid toner electrostatic printers that could produce higher quality billboards and signs.
Iris Graphics produced the fist photographic quality wide format inkjet in 1988 – the 3047. This used continuous flow print heads over a spinning drunk that held sheets of paper. The quality was good enough for Iris machines to be used as the basis of the first digital fine art printers, whose results are given the somewhat pretentious name of giclee.
Scitex took over Iris and developed its technology into a successful range of digital proofing systems. DuPont used a broadly similar technology from Stork Graphics to produce the Cromlin Digital proofer. Both sold very well until around 2000 when sales overtaken by the very much cheaper drop on-demand printers from the likes of Canon, Epson and HP.
For many commercial printers their introduction to inkjet would have been through such a proofer, which could also be used for low volume, high quality ‘print for pay’ work such as posters and point of sale signs. However, these use aqueous (water based) inks that are not suitable for use outdoors.
The early 1990s onward saw the adaption of inkjets built specially for outdoor sign work, with solvent based inks that etch into plastics and are weather and sun resistant for many years.
Some of these are very large printers indeed, offering print widths between three and five metres (usually called ‘grand format’). Aqueous inkjets are rarely wider than 1.6 metres. The first signage machines were developed by relatively small companies such as Signtech and Michelangelo. NUR originally worked with Scitex on early signage machines, but Scitex soon brought the technology in-house by purchasing Idanit, another Israeli company, to form Scitex Vision.

New Look Website for The Printing House Website – 15th July 2009

We’ve been working hard over recent months to try create a new look and new content for our flagship brand The Printing House Website. When you find some time, please take a look and feed back to us. Some of the new content includes A Guide to Preparing Print Ready Artwork and information about our Large Format and banner printing service.

We’re a bit sad and are so excited by our new site that we’re now rebranding Print Buying Direct, Golf Club Centenary Books and School Prospectus Made Easy – so keep an eye out – we’ll email when its available on line.

Keep watching all our sites as we are continually adding new content.

To be continued…

See part one of this blog on digital printing here. Also – what does the future hold for printing – part 1

All about the new Printing House Website

Order your Appointment Cards online at Print Buying Direct – prices from £13.50 for 100 cards printed in full colour. At print buying direct we are market leaders in the printing of appointment cards and can produce them for doctors, hairdressers, dentists, physio, beauty salons, nail technicians, garages, massage therapists – for anything really. Just visit our Appointment Cards web page for more information.

Our business cards are some of the best in the business – printed in full colour on our £200,000 state of the art digital press – you’ll be proud to hand out business cards that we produce for you. Our business card prices are also very cost effective – 100 full colour business cards for only £10!

Don’t forget we’re still running our Letterheads promotion – 2000 full colour letterheads (headed paper) for £125 delivered! We’ve been producing letterheads since 1991 for hundreds of customs as diverse as Bentley and Royal Mail.

See Part 12 of this blog on Print finishing, See also our Blog on Spot UV Varnishing

Print Buying Direct and School Prospectus Made Easy are both brands of parent company – The Printing House Ltd of Crewe, Cheshire, UK. Keep visiting both websites for details of our latest offers and promotions. For more information School Prospectus including School Prospectus Design or School Prospectus Printing (we also specialise in college prospectus) see our www.schoolprospectus.info website

Have a look at our Newsletters webpage for help and assistance with writing and designing your newsletter. It deals with, company newsletters, college newsletters, school newsletters and employee newsletters in particluar. Our blog often focuses on newsletters and we have a page which specifically helps with newsletters as a marketing tool.

TOP TIP: Add that feel of quality to your company brochure by first applying Matt Lamination then a Spot UV Varnish. The UV Varnishing actually ‘lifts’ your pictures to give them a glossy impact.

Our Digital Brochures (turn page technology) are really taking off now – get your brochure put online from only £15 per page.

One of the mainstays at Print Buying Direct is Leaflets. We are experts at Leaflet Design or Leaflet Printing Check out our Banner Stands (pop up banners) only £99. Design service available.

New Look Website for The Printing House Website – 15th July 2009

We’ve been working in the background to create a new look and some new content for The Printing House Website. Please take a look and let us have some feedback. Some of the new content includes A Guide to Preparing Print Ready Artwork and information about our Large Format and banner printing service.

We’re a bit sad and are so excited by our new site that we’re now rebranding Print Buying Direct, Golf Club Centenary Books and School Prospectus Made Easy.

Keep watching all our sites as we are continually adding new content.

To be continued…

See part one of this blog on digital printing here. Also – what does the future hold for printing – part 1

Order your Appointment Cards online at Print Buying Direct – prices from £13.50 for 100 cards printed in full colour. At print buying direct we are market leaders in the printing of appointment cards and can produce them for doctors, hairdressers, dentists, physio, beauty salons, nail technicians, garages, massage therapists – for anything really. Just visit our Appointment Cards web page for more information.

Our business cards are some of the best in the business – printed in full colour on our £200,000 state of the art digital press – you’ll be proud to hand out business cards that we produce for you. Our business card prices are also very cost effective – 100 full colour business cards for only £10!

Don’t forget we’re still running our Letterheads promotion – 2000 full colour letterheads (headed paper) for £125 delivered! We’ve been producing letterheads since 1991 for hundreds of customs as diverse as Bentley and Royal Mail.

See Part 12 of this blog on Print finishing, See also our Blog on Spot UV Varnishing

Print Buying Direct and School Prospectus Made Easy are both brands of parent company – The Printing House Ltd of Crewe, Cheshire, UK. Keep visiting both websites for details of our latest offers and promotions. For more information School Prospectus including School Prospectus Design or School Prospectus Printing (we also specialise in college prospectus) see our www.schoolprospectus.info website

Have a look at our Newsletters webpage for help and assistance with writing and designing your newsletter. It deals with, company newsletters, college newsletters, school newsletters and employee newsletters in particluar. Our blog often focuses on newsletters and we have a page which specifically helps with newsletters as a marketing tool.

TOP TIP: Add that feel of quality to your company brochure by first applying Matt Lamination then a Spot UV Varnish. The UV Varnishing actually ‘lifts’ your pictures to give them a glossy impact.

Our Digital Brochures (turn page technology) are really taking off now – get your brochure put online from only £15 per page.

One of the mainstays at Print Buying Direct is Leaflets. We are experts at Leaflet Design & Leaflet Printing

Check out our Banner Stands (pull up banners) only £99. Design service available.

Everything you need to know about Digital Printing – part 4 – 7th July 2009
Other manufacturers were quick to develop colour copiers and standalone printers of their own. Over the next two decades the technology was developed for higher speed, quality and volume machines that became loosely known as digital production presses. Despite Canon’s early lead, it stuck to copier derived engines for more than 15 years. Its first speed production class machine, the imagePress 7000VP, was a completely new design announced in 2006 and shipped a year later in Europe. The first of what we would recognise as a modern digital colour production press was announced in 1993 by an obscure Belgian start up company called Xeikon. Actually, it was a spin off result of development effort at Afga in the 1980s to produce its own toner printers. Agfa initially provided finance for Xeikon and also set up a factory to make the dry toner. The first printer was called DCP-1 and established the basic format that it still uses today a reel fed machine with a tower containing multiple LED electro photographic colour units, arranged in line on both sides of the web, allowing duplex colour to be produced in a single pass.
While Xeikon was present at the Ipex of 1993, most of the publicity went to Agfa, which was selling the DCP-1 under its own badge as the Chromapress. The machine proved successful being, for its time, fairly fast and reliable. DCP-1 had a 320mm web width and was followed in 1997 by a second generation series, DCP32 plus a wider machine called DCP- 50D with a 500 mm web width. For years this was the only digital printer to handle an A3 page landscape (boosting productivity), or A2 portrait. All Xeikons were also notable for being able to produce seamless banner prints of virtually unlimited length.
This attracted attention from other manufacturers who wanted a digital colour machine in their own ranges, and Xeikon was happy to work with anyone. In addition to Agfa, several generations of these printers were sold in significant numbers by IBM (which renamed them infoPrint) and Xerox (which called then DocuColor 70, 90 and 100). Barco Graphics (now part of EskoArtwork) sold the printers with its own advanced variable data front ends, and Nilpeter sold a version adapted for single sided label printing.
Xeikon’s fortunes soared in the 1990s and by the end of the decade it was getting ambitious, showing off early photo printing lines and talking about a fast sheetfed printer. In 1999, it brought Nipson, a French developer of high speed monochrome digital printers.

To be continued…

See part one of this blog on digital thinking here

Order your Appointment Cards online at Print Buying Direct – prices from £13.50 for 100 cards printed in full colour. At print buying direct we are market leaders in the printing of appointment cards and can produce them for doctors, hairdressers, dentists, physio, beauty salons, nail technicians, garages, massage therapists – for anything really. Just visit our Appointment Cards web page for more information.

Our business cards are some of the best in the business – printed in full colour on our £200,000 state of the art digital press – you’ll be proud to hand out business cards that we produce for you. Our business card prices are also very cost effective – 100 full colour business cards for only £10!

Don’t forget we’re still running our Letterheads promotion – 2000 full colour letterheads (headed paper) for £125 delivered! We’ve been producing letterheads since 1991 for hundreds of customs as diverse as Bentley and Royal Mail.

See Part 12 of this blog on Print finishing, See also our Blog on Spot UV Varnishing

Print Buying Direct and School Prospectus Made Easy are both brands of parent company – The Printing House Ltd of Crewe, Cheshire, UK. Keep visiting both websites for details of our latest offers and promotions. For more information School Prospectus including School Prospectus Design or School Prospectus Printing (we also specialise in college prospectus) see our www.schoolprospectus.info website

Have a look at our Newsletters webpage for help and assistance with writing and designing your newsletter. It deals with, company newsletters, college newsletters, school newsletters and employee newsletters in particluar. Our blog often focuses on newsletters and we have a page which specifically helps with newsletters as a marketing tool.

TOP TIP: Add that feel of quality to your company brochure by first applying Matt Lamination then a Spot UV Varnish. The UV Varnishing actually ‘lifts’ your pictures to give them a glossy impact.

Our Digital Brochures (turn page technology) are really taking off now – get your brochure put online from only £15 per page.

One of the mainstays at Print Buying Direct is Leaflets. We are experts at Leaflet Design & Leaflet Printing.

Everything you need to know about Digital Printing – part 3 – 6th July 2009
Digital toner production printers
Today, electro photography is mainly used for smaller (or at least narrower) print formats up to A3+ sheets or 32 cm reels. True laser printers are restricted in width because the optics associated with the laser beam loses sharpness over anything much wider than that. However, that doesn’t apply to LED arrays or the alternative magentography and ion beam systems, so these can be wider. So, for instance, the LED based Xeikon machines can produce reel fed toner presses up to 52 cm wide.
In 1989 Canon introduced the world’s first commercial digital colour copier, the CLC-500. This ground breaking machine was the foundation of a whole new product sector and led directly to today’s colour production presses. The configuration was a colour scanner linked to a four colour laser printer that produced excellent, near contone images. Third party developers quickly realised that they could interrupt the live link from scanner to printer and feed in digital data from an external source, making a standalone digital colour printer.
Various companies produced hardware conversions over the nest couple of years, but it was EFI that was the most successful with its original Fiery Colour Server, hardware RIP with networking and very good colour management that could control the print engine directly. After a while Canon saw the potential and co-operated with EFI, in particular to offer the CLC-500 and its successors as what became known as multifunction devices or as speeds increased, light production printers.

To be continued…

Order your Appointment Cards online at Print Buying Direct – prices from £13.50 for 100 cards printed in full colour. At print buying direct we are market leaders in the printing of appointment cards and can produce them for doctors, hairdressers, dentists, physio, beauty salons, nail technicians, garages, massage therapists – for anything really. Just visit our Appointment Cards web page for more information.

Our business cards are some of the best in the business – printed in full colour on our £200,000 state of the art digital press – you’ll be proud to hand out business cards that we produce for you. Our business card prices are also very cost effective – 100 full colour business cards for only £10!

Don’t forget we’re still running our Letterheads promotion – 2000 full colour letterheads (headed paper) for £125 delivered! We’ve been producing letterheads since 1991 for hundreds of customs as diverse as Bentley and Royal Mail.

See Part 12 of this blog on Print finishing, See also our Blog on Spot UV Varnishing

Print Buying Direct and School Prospectus Made Easy are both brands of parent company – The Printing House Ltd of Crewe, Cheshire, UK. Keep visiting both websites for details of our latest offers and promotions. For more information School Prospectus including School Prospectus Design or School Prospectus Printing (we also specialise in college prospectus) see our www.schoolprospectus.info website

Have a look at our Newsletters webpage for help and assistance with writing and designing your newsletter. It deals with, company newsletters, college newsletters, school newsletters and employee newsletters in particluar. Our blog often focuses on newsletters and we have a page which specifically helps with newsletters as a marketing tool.

TOP TIP: Add that feel of quality to your company brochure by first applying Matt Lamination then a Spot UV Varnish. The UV Varnishing actually ‘lifts’ your pictures to give them a glossy impact.

Our Digital Brochures (turn page technology) are really taking off now – get your brochure put online from only £15 per page.

One of the mainstays at Print Buying Direct is Leaflets. We are experts at Leaflet Design & Leaflet Printing.

Everything you need to know about Digital Printing – part 2 – 3rd July 2009
Electro photography
Dry toner digital printers are used at all levels from desktop personal printers and copiers, to general commercial production print, to high speed reel fed systems used for transactional work, direct mail and books.
The technical term for dry toner processes is usually xerography or electrograph.
Our two decades sweep of history saw the introduction of the first practical full colour digital devices. These laid the foundations of today’s ‘production’ printers as well as the introduction of very affordable desktop ‘multifunction devices’ (MFDs) and networked mid production departmental copier-printers.
Last year (2008), saw the 70th anniversary of the invention of the process by Chester Carlson, a US scientist and patent attorney who was determined to find a simple and clean way to make copies of documents. He called the invention xerography, from the Greek words xeros (dry) and graphics (writing), to distinguish it from the wet chemical mimeograph copying processes that existed at the time. His first xerographic copy let directly to today’s vast photocopier and digital toner printer product lines. It also led to the founding of Xerox, which has been a consistent pioneer and always a major name in the development and commercial supply of copiers and, for the past three decades, has pioneered digital laser printers in particular.
Although ‘xerography’ was intended to be a generic label and can refer to any similar dry toner process, its close association with the Xerox name means that rival manufacturers tend to prefer the term ‘electrophotography’.
Until the 1970s, all such machines were photocopiers that used optical systems to reflect and project the image of the original onto the photosensitive drum, which became statically charged and was able to pick up the toner and subsequently transfer it to paper for fusing. The invention of the laser allowed the imaging process to be controlled from a computer, giving rise to the first digital laser printers. Not all digital dry toner machines are laser printers; other imaging can include LEDs and more rarely, ion beams and magnetic imagers.

To be continued…

Order your Appointment Cards online at Print Buying Direct – prices from £13.50 for 100 cards printed in full colour. At print buying direct we are market leaders in the printing of appointment cards and can produce them for doctors, hairdressers, dentists, physio, beauty salons, nail technicians, garages, massage therapists – for anything really. Just visit our Appointment Cards web page for more information.

Our business cards are some of the best in the business – printed in full colour on our £200,000 state of the art digital press – you’ll be proud to hand out business cards that we produce for you. Our business card prices are also very cost effective – 100 full colour business cards for only £10!

Don’t forget we’re still running our Letterheads promotion – 2000 full colour letterheads (headed paper) for £125 delivered! We’ve been producing letterheads since 1991 for hundreds of customs as diverse as Bentley and Royal Mail.

See Part 12 of this blog on Print finishing, See also our Blog on Spot UV Varnishing

Print Buying Direct and School Prospectus Made Easy are both brands of parent company – The Printing House Ltd of Crewe, Cheshire, UK. Keep visiting both websites for details of our latest offers and promotions. For more information School Prospectus including School Prospectus Design or School Prospectus Printing (we also specialise in college prospectus) see our www.schoolprospectus.info website

Have a look at our Newsletters webpage for help and assistance with writing and designing your newsletter. It deals with, company newsletters, college newsletters, school newsletters and employee newsletters in particluar. Our blog often focuses on newsletters and we have a page which specifically helps with newsletters as a marketing tool.

TOP TIP: Add that feel of quality to your company brochure by first applying Matt Lamination then a Spot UV Varnish. The UV Varnishing actually ‘lifts’ your pictures to give them a glossy impact.

Our Digital Brochures (turn page technology) are really taking off now – get your brochure put online from only £15 per page.

One of the mainstays at Print Buying Direct is Leaflets. We are experts at Leaflet Design & Leaflet Printing.

Everything you need to know about Digital Printing – part 1 – 2nd July 2009
What is ‘digital print’ anyway? It is a term used for whole group of technologies that don’t fit neatly into a single definition. However, a good description would be one of a number of printing processes where a marking engine applies an image to a substrate based on digital input, with no permanent intermediary such as an offset plate, raised flexographic plate, or engraved cylinder.
What is often called ‘true’ digital process generates a fresh image for very copy, so content of the print can be changed every time, a concept called variable data printing (VDP).
The need for using the word ‘true’ is that there is a grey area with DI presses – offset litho presses that have integral plate imagers. These share many of the pre-press and operating characteristics of ‘true’ digital printers, but the use of litho plates means that the image cannot be varied from copy to copy.
The most common true digital print processes over the past 20 years have been dry toner (best known as laser printers), HP Indigo’s digital offset colour process, and inkjets. All have progressed by leaps and bounds over two decades, but there is still a vast future potential for improvements in speed, productivity, quality, flexibility, consumables and running costs.

To be continued…

Order your Appointment Cards online at Print Buying Direct – prices from £13.50 for 100 cards printed in full colour. At print buying direct we are market leaders in the printing of appointment cards and can produce them for doctors, hairdressers, dentists, physio, beauty salons, nail technicians, garages, massage therapists – for anything really. Just visit our Appointment Cards web page for more information.

Our business cards are some of the best in the business – printed in full colour on our £200,000 state of the art digital press – you’ll be proud to hand out business cards that we produce for you. Our business card prices are also very cost effective – 100 full colour business cards for only £10!

Don’t forget we’re still running our Letterheads promotion – 2000 full colour letterheads (headed paper) for £125 delivered! We’ve been producing letterheads since 1991 for hundreds of customs as diverse as Bentley and Royal Mail.

See Part 12 of this blog on Print finishing, See also our Blog on Spot UV Varnishing

Print Buying Direct and School Prospectus Made Easy are both brands of parent company – The Printing House Ltd of Crewe, Cheshire, UK. Keep visiting both websites for details of our latest offers and promotions. For more information School Prospectus including School Prospectus Design or School Prospectus Printing (we also specialise in college prospectus) see our www.schoolprospectus.info website

Have a look at our Newsletters webpage for help and assistance with writing and designing your newsletter. It deals with, company newsletters, college newsletters, school newsletters and employee newsletters in particluar. Our blog often focuses on newsletters and we have a page which specifically helps with newsletters as a marketing tool.

TOP TIP: Add that feel of quality to your company brochure by first applying Matt Lamination then a Spot UV Varnish. The UV Varnishing actually ‘lifts’ your pictures to give them a glossy impact.

Our Digital Brochures (turn page technology) are really taking off now – get your brochure put online from only £15 per page.

One of the mainstays at Print Buying Direct is Leaflets. We are experts at Leaflet Design & Leaflet Printing.

The markets tomorrow – What does the future hold for printing? – Part 8 – 1st July 2009
Pack functionality can be broadened to show the ambient conditions it has been stored at since filling. Bioett has time temperatures tags that can be interrogated to ensure products such as vaccine have been stored correctly so the ‘use by’ date is replaced by a still ‘still active’ message – very important in developing regions. With the UK’s ageing populations and a stretched health service it will be more important to ensure the right medication is taken by the right person at the right time. Manufacturers can supply devices that remind patients when to take their medication and check that they do. Med-IC has an electronic compliance monitoring device that tracks medication use from any standard blister packaging without active patient input. As the patient takes a tablet from the pack, the MED-IC ECM solution uses sensor grid technology and a proprietary process of printed conductive inks that detects when the grid has been broken. When the pack is finished a radio frequency reader and monitoring software can retrieve and display patient compliance, medication diaries and pill counts that is vital in bringing new drugs to the population. If the cupboard has a connection with a toilet containing appropriate sensors routine screening of urine can be recorded, valuable for doctors and potentially spotting early changed that might be health threatening such as diabetes.
Mind what you say!
Forecasting the future is laden with danger when people remember what you said years ago. I remember Bill Gates saying ‘a 640 k memory is enough for anyone’, in 2018 you will see petabyte arrays. Horace Greely, printer and newspaperman was absolutely right, however when he said, ‘the illusion that times were better than those that are has probably pervaded all ages’. Many printers firmly believed this, if you are one you need to understand the reasons for the changes that will probably happen and develop a strategy, but there will be many successful printers then. They will be doing different things using different methods because they see what customers and end customers want and provide these services, well.

To be continued…

See Part 6 of this blog on the future of printing.

Order your Appointment Cards online at Print Buying Direct – prices from £13.50 for 100 cards printed in full colour. At print buying direct we are market leaders in the printing of appointment cards and can produce them for doctors, hairdressers, dentists, physio, beauty salons, nail technicians, garages, massage therapists – for anything really. Just visit our Appointment Cards web page for more information.

Our business cards are some of the best in the business – printed in full colour on our £200,000 state of the art digital press – you’ll be proud to hand out business cards that we produce for you. Our business card prices are also very cost effective – 100 full colour business cards for only £10!

Don’t forget we’re still running our Letterheads promotion – 2000 full colour letterheads (headed paper) for £125 delivered! We’ve been producing letterheads since 1991 for hundreds of customs as diverse as Bentley and Royal Mail.

See Part 12 of this blog on Print finishing, See also our Blog on Spot UV Varnishing

Print Buying Direct and School Prospectus Made Easy are both brands of parent company – The Printing House Ltd of Crewe, Cheshire, UK. Keep visiting both websites for details of our latest offers and promotions. For more information School Prospectus including School Prospectus Design or School Prospectus Printing (we also specialise in college prospectus) see our www.schoolprospectus.info website

Have a look at our Newsletters webpage for help and assistance with writing and designing your newsletter. It deals with, company newsletters, college newsletters, school newsletters and employee newsletters in particluar. Our blog often focuses on newsletters and we have a page which specifically helps with newsletters as a marketing tool.

TOP TIP: Add that feel of quality to your company brochure by first applying Matt Lamination then a Spot UV Varnish. The UV Varnishing actually ‘lifts’ your pictures to give them a glossy impact.

Our Digital Brochures (turn page technology) are really taking off now – get your brochure put online from only £15 per page.

One of the mainstays at Print Buying Direct is Leaflets. We are experts at Leaflet Design & Leaflet Printing.

The markets tomorrow – What does the future hold for printing? – Part 6 – 29th June 2009
Getting smart
More security will be built in to many print products to help brand protection, anti-counterfeiting and to keep ahead of the copiers. Many new products will be linked to the development of RFID technologies like credit cards, smart cards, and other printed security products. Biometrics will in corporated into passports, licences, smart cards and even tickets to prove the identity of the bearer. As well as chips, printed 2D barcodes and glyphs that can be unscrambled in readers to provide a picture of the owner, with a fingerprint or even a part of a DNA code that can be easily tested.
Smart labels will be a key component in future. These incorporate an electronic capability achieved through the laying down of conductive inks, polymers or semiconducting polymers onto the surface of the paper or board. The development of printable radio frequency identification (RFID) devices will be particularly important. Other capabilities being examined include displays that offer the opportunity for constantly updateable and information. Currently silkscreen is being used to lay down the thick layers, inkjet will become more prevalent as new fluids are developed and complex capability can be laid down in a single pass. Smart electronic displays and RFID will become common in packaging.
Stora Enso has several novel concepts and demonstrations. One is for automatic opening and re-closing packaging systems with a carton formed to mimic the mechanism of a flower opening. The pack can open or close under certain conditions depending on shape memory where materials revert to previous shapes under the influence of heat, light or electricity. This could create seals that open under certain environmental conditions, e.g. when a microwaveable meal reaches the correct cooking temperature or a drinks container is suitably chilled. Linking this with reversible glue systems, requiring electricity to reverse the polarity of surfaces and effectively switch to glue on or off makes easy opening and re-closing of a pack, increasing the life of a perishable item. So, instead of wrestling with a cap or seal you just touch a printed button. Such developments will provide dramatic improvements in the open ability/ close ability of packs, an issue that is growing concern to older people. ‘Senior friendly’ packaging will be easy to open but still take child safety into account.

To be continued…

See Part 5 of this blog on the future of printing.

Order your Appointment Cards online at Print Buying Direct – prices from £13.50 for 100 cards printed in full colour. At print buying direct we are market leaders in the printing of appointment cards and can produce them for doctors, hairdressers, dentists, physio, beauty salons, nail technicians, garages, massage therapists – for anything really. Just visit our Appointment Cards web page for more information.

Our business cards are some of the best in the business – printed in full colour on our £200,000 state of the art digital press – you’ll be proud to hand out business cards that we produce for you. Our business card prices are also very cost effective – 100 full colour business cards for only £10!

Don’t forget we’re still running our Letterheads promotion – 2000 full colour letterheads (headed paper) for £125 delivered! We’ve been producing letterheads since 1991 for hundreds of customs as diverse as Bentley and Royal Mail.

See Part 12 of this blog on Print finishing, See also our Blog on Spot UV Varnishing

Print Buying Direct and School Prospectus Made Easy are both brands of parent company – The Printing House Ltd of Crewe, Cheshire, UK. Keep visiting both websites for details of our latest offers and promotions. For more information School Prospectus including School Prospectus Design or School Prospectus Printing (we also specialise in college prospectus) see our www.schoolprospectus.info website

Have a look at our Newsletters webpage for help and assistance with writing and designing your newsletter. It deals with, company newsletters, college newsletters, school newsletters and employee newsletters in particluar. Our blog often focuses on newsletters and we have a page which specifically helps with newsletters as a marketing tool.

TOP TIP: Add that feel of quality to your company brochure by first applying Matt Lamination then a Spot UV Varnish. The UV Varnishing actually ‘lifts’ your pictures to give them a glossy impact.

Our Digital Brochures (turn page technology) are really taking off now – get your brochure put online from only £15 per page.

One of the mainstays at Print Buying Direct is Leaflets. We are experts at Leaflet Design & Leaflet Printing.

The markets tomorrow – What does the future hold for printing? – Part 5 – 26th June 2009
Mixing and matching
As consumers get used to using the Internet to book a flight, manage their finances, buy books, groceries and even a car they are irrevocably changed and print may not satisfy their requirements. They may choose electronic billing and stop receiving printed versions. Once lost this volume cannot be replaced. There are opportunities for print, however. Legislation demands records are kept, paper versions of bills and statements are accepted legally while there is no proof for electronic delivery. Much e-mail does not get to the intended recipient as spam filters and corporate firewalls filter much out, and often e-mails will be cursorily examined and quickly deleted. Brand owners and retailers will learn that consumers browsing a website do so anonymously and so a potential prospective customer may be lost. A filled in form or a phone request for a brochure provides the identity of a potentially interested customer. Concerns about government and Internet service companies recording e-mails, websites visited, instant messages, phone calls and texts may cramp the potential for electronic communication to print’s advantage.
Print can be a part of the mix and printers will become expert in helping customers reach their customers with tools developed from today’s technologies – e-mail, SMS messaging, RSS, blogs, wikis, mash-ups, memes, social networking, viral marketing and the next bight thing that does not exist yet. Google is set to change publishing and information irrevocably and it is just ten years old. Printers should know about these and find how their print products can fit in with them.
Print can help drive prospects to a site, with a personalised micro site engaging visitors with offers to them. A leaflet, direct mail or magazines can generate leads by offering a benefit for the consumer to register interest. The clichéd term ‘The overall customer journey’ is bandied about by marketers and print has a role in finding prospects, selecting prime suspects, converting them in more valuable customers. Printers need to understand how their customers are using the new technologies and see how they can help. They need to develop strategies to get into the concept and design stage of a campaign.
Some major printers, arvato is a great example, actively help customers optimise their communications while others pay lip service to the process but the tide is starting to change.

To be continued…

See Part 2 of this blog on the future of printing.

Order your Appointment Cards online at Print Buying Direct – prices from £13.50 for 100 cards printed in full colour. At print buying direct we are market leaders in the printing of appointment cards and can produce them for doctors, hairdressers, dentists, physio, beauty salons, nail technicians, garages, massage therapists – for anything really. Just visit our Appointment Cards web page for more information.

Our business cards are some of the best in the business – printed in full colour on our £200,000 state of the art digital press – you’ll be proud to hand out business cards that we produce for you. Our business card prices are also very cost effective – 100 full colour business cards for only £10!

Don’t forget we’re still running our Letterheads promotion – 2000 full colour letterheads (headed paper) for £125 delivered! We’ve been producing letterheads since 1991 for hundreds of customs as diverse as Bentley and Royal Mail.

See Part 12 of this blog on Print finishing, See also our Blog on Spot UV Varnishing

Print Buying Direct and School Prospectus Made Easy are both brands of parent company – The Printing House Ltd of Crewe, Cheshire, UK. Keep visiting both websites for details of our latest offers and promotions. For more information School Prospectus including School Prospectus Design or School Prospectus Printing (we also specialise in college prospectus) see our www.schoolprospectus.info website

Have a look at our Newsletters webpage for help and assistance with writing and designing your newsletter. It deals with, company newsletters, college newsletters, school newsletters and employee newsletters in particluar. Our blog often focuses on newsletters and we have a page which specifically helps with newsletters as a marketing tool.

TOP TIP: Add that feel of quality to your company brochure by first applying Matt Lamination then a Spot UV Varnish. The UV Varnishing actually ‘lifts’ your pictures to give them a glossy impact.

Our Digital Brochures (turn page technology) are really taking off now – get your brochure put online from only £15 per page.

One of the mainstays at Print Buying Direct is Leaflets. We are experts at Leaflet Design & Leaflet Printing.

The markets tomorrow – What does the future hold for printing? – Part 4 – 25th June 2009
As readers stop buying newspapers, publishers respond with more colour, more pages and more sections and launching new free titles and products funded by advertising that help keep up the demand for print. They will be different in ten years; the line of reasoning from News International that placing digital sites in remote locations would ease the time and environmental burden of newspaper distribution and make the title more timely for potential subscribers, as well as allowing more targeted local advertising outlets, mean readers will get more from their newspapers.
While the magazine and newspaper content on the web is mostly funded by the print version, the development budget of publishers and many corporates is spent on electronic versions, snazzy websites rather than conventional printed version. Organisations have a choice of media to reach their target audience, and depending on the targets they will use a mix. Over the past few years there has been a great deal of experimentation as organisations, marketers and designers learn about new media. Print is not seen as particularly ‘sexy’ by the new wave of entrants into organisations, but there are things that print can do to change that opinion, making it more interactive is one trend and that will be mainstream in ten years.

To be continued…

See Part 2 of this blog on the future of printing.

Order your Appointment Cards online at Print Buying Direct – prices from £13.50 for 100 cards printed in full colour. At print buying direct we are market leaders in the printing of appointment cards and can produce them for doctors, hairdressers, dentists, physio, beauty salons, nail technicians, garages, massage therapists – for anything really. Just visit our Appointment Cards web page for more information.

Our business cards are some of the best in the business – printed in full colour on our £200,000 state of the art digital press – you’ll be proud to hand out business cards that we produce for you. Our business card prices are also very cost effective – 100 full colour business cards for only £10!

Don’t forget we’re still running our Letterheads promotion – 2000 full colour letterheads (headed paper) for £125 delivered! We’ve been producing letterheads since 1991 for hundreds of customs as diverse as Bentley and Royal Mail.

See Part 12 of this blog on Print finishing, See also our Blog on Spot UV Varnishing

Print Buying Direct and School Prospectus Made Easy are both brands of parent company – The Printing House Ltd of Crewe, Cheshire, UK. Keep visiting both websites for details of our latest offers and promotions. For more information School Prospectus including School Prospectus Design or School Prospectus Printing (we also specialise in college prospectus) see our www.schoolprospectus.info website

Have a look at our Newsletters webpage for help and assistance with writing and designing your newsletter. It deals with, company newsletters, college newsletters, school newsletters and employee newsletters in particluar. Our blog often focuses on newsletters and we have a page which specifically helps with newsletters as a marketing tool.

TOP TIP: Add that feel of quality to your company brochure by first applying Matt Lamination then a Spot UV Varnish. The UV Varnishing actually ‘lifts’ your pictures to give them a glossy impact.

Our Digital Brochures (turn page technology) are really taking off now – get your brochure put online from only £15 per page.

One of the mainstays at Print Buying Direct is Leaflets. We are experts at Leaflet Design & Leaflet Printing.