In a serious wake-up call printers at Ipex today heard a queue of agency types telling them that print worked for them as part of their communication mix, but that printers needed to get onto the front foot to reap the rewards.
As part of the World Print Summit, agency heads took part in the Print Buying session, and told the assembled guests that printers were terrible at communicating, even though they had a great product mix.
They said that printers were shooting themselves in the foot by taking a passive role and selling on price.
On the bright side, all the agency heads said print was an essential, indeed pivotal, part of their communication mix. They gave example after example of it working superbly in tandem with digital media.
However, they bemoaned the fact that printers didn't want to talk innovation and ROI, but rather talked quality and price.
[Related: More Ipex news]
A typical response came from Charlotte Smyth, from an award winning London marketing agency. She says: “We need print, but we need it as part of a mix. Printers are stuck in the past, wanting to focus on taking orders and competing on price.”
“I want to talk value, I want to talk ROI, I want to talk innovation, I want to talk successful campaigns for my clients,I want to talk solutions. Those printers that can come to me and show how they can solve my challenges, how they can integrate with digital, how we can achieve great ROI together for my clients are the ones that will win. Sadly they are few and far between.”
On the floor the Konica Minolta KH-1 was the biggest crowd pleaser of the day, in fact Konica was itself mightily pleased, its large stand has been packed for the past two days, and with no direct rivals here it is making hay.
George Fryer from Konica Minolta in Australia – who has been hosting several Aussies at the stand – says the technology for new applications on show “will be assessed before we decide if Australian printers will benefit from them”.
[Related: More Konica Minolta news]
One of the most innovative new solutions at Ipex is LumeJet, which is printing ultra-high-quality digital colour with LED.
It prints onto silver halide based paper, the LED exposing the silver halides. It is then a contone RGB print, but Miles Bentley, commercial director at LumeJet says the technology converts the LED rays down by a factor of five which ‘completely eliminates any flaring’.
Text is printable in high definition down to one point. Sadly, LumeJet, which has just been commercially released in the UK, Germany and the US won't be coming to Australia until the back end of next year.
Screen has its new UV L350 label press on the floor, announcing its first sale, and Keith Atherton from Screen ANZ told ProPrint he expects Aussie label printers to be inking orders soon.
“With the new white ink option, and a throughput and quality level that delivers the converters and label printers have an unbeatable digital option for short run high quality work,” he says.
The L350 UV outputs 50 metres a minute at 322mm wide. Screen also had a TruePress Jet 520 on the floor, and launched a new flatbed UV printer, the 3.2m wide W3200, which outputs 90sqm an hour, with an option later this year for 150sqm an hour.
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