What next for printing?

What next for printing?

To be honest I'm not so hot at predicting the future. If I were, I could have made a career as a futurologist. Or invested in Zoom twelve months ago.

I can look back and marvel at how printing has changed in the space of ten years. So, I guess the first tentative suggestion is that things will have changed again, quite radically in the next ten years.

Next prediction... Minuteman Press Stockport will have relocated. A printing business friend popped in last week and as part of our insider chat revealed he used to work at a printers not 10 metres down the road, long since gone. He had moved to an old mill down in the nearby valley. This mill burnt down. He moved to a repurposed hat factory in Offerton. This is being redeveloped for residential use and he has moved 5 miles up the road.

Next prediction, printing technology will have moved on, again. Our £20,000 digital printer produces top quality prints with beautiful colour accuracy. Ten years ago the same type of machines were less capable, slower and produced dubious colour matches.

Last week was memorable because we printed a letterhead using old school lithographic print technology. Nowadays most printing is produced using inline full colour presses. All the colours of the rainbows are produced using a mix of five printer inks; and five inks only. The big deal about this is, it improves the opportunity to mass produce print and bring the cost right down. A downside is that colour match is more difficult; this can be a big deal for a company or brand that has chosen one colour easily identified as their colour (think Royal Mail). This colour is remarkably powerful, even a glance at the colour can immediately cause recognition of the brand. So, enter Pantone colours. To be quite honest (as I usually am) Pantone colours are just annoying; printers might have a special fire resistant cupboard merely to store the scores of different ink colours. Last week we printed using two Pantone colours, a black and a red. It's a long winded process but the end result is great colour match to the last print job (in this case a letterhead).

So, onto the next prediction, inkjet technology will eventually overtake lithographic print technology. Currently the inkjet technology is usually just annoying, what with messy and expensive ink cartridges and even worse, nozzles that dry out. Inkjet is dominating wide format printing but, it's expensive, and is still outclassed by lithographic printing for long runs of posters etc..

The last prediction for the day... printing will be around for some time yet. In fact I just finished reading a tongue in the cheek blog about the best way of long term storage of data. The blog starts by explaining how a rather large QR code could store lots of data; but return in one hundred years and the read technology will have been lost. Step up printing... still around and readable after a thousand years of technological change.