SPECTRUM 2001 CONFERENCE NOTES

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Total Process Digitization: What Lies Ahead

Moderated by:

Jeff Peterson
Senior Vice President of E-Business
Quebecor World

Jeff organized this session so that the panel included a print buyer, a printer, and an output provider that each could talk about their view of total process digitization. Nicki Milner of Que-Net media said that the move to PDF exchange of page files has allowed documents to be "re-purposed" to E-books and web PDFs. Now the assets, which precede page layout, are moving directly to output, as Grey pointed out earlier. We are now seeing that these publishing workflows must integrate with business systems and productions systems. Business systems that are candidates for total process digitization include:

Que-Net media has introduced several software tools and services that provide these types of integra-tion that provide internet-enabled workflows, online proofing and annotations, internet ad submission and tracking, web-accessible job tracking, and so forth. The future is about content, collaboration, and control. The use of standards, such as JDF, are the key to making any of this work and will become part of Que-media's buying and selection criteria. In the future, publishing workflow must accommo-date writers, producers, and consumers who are anywhere, at anyplace, and at anytime.

Frank Selker, President of Document Planet, said that Document Planet is basically a print broker. They have a wide range of reps that bring in jobs. They then preflight and check all customer documents before they go out. Why? They want to ensure that the customer's job is going to print on time and at the quality expected. To control the "keys to the kingdom" (e.g., the relationship with the customer), they protect the customer by providing digital quality control. Even thought this service cost Print Planet money upfront, it allows them to provide guaranteed quality files to printers, who in turn can price and schedule more aggressively, and in the long run everyone saves money: the printer isn't fixing files and the customer gets a price break. To provide this service, Document Planet has decided to use Heidel-berg's Printergy systems as the a single vendor for its equipment and software.

Stanley Rosen of CreoScitex said that one of the results of the move to total digitalization is the re-surgence of stochastic or "frequency modulated" (FM) screening. In a recent GATF study, they found that one of the biggest reasons for press re-runs was that the color variation over the length of a press run was unacceptable to customers. Stochastic screening inherently provides better color rendition and consistency throughout the run. Stanley also suggested that stochastic screening provides cleaner color where colors are overprinted colors.

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