In the Grow Your Biz blog post, "Your Chemistry Free Plate Requires Chemistry", I challenged Agfa's "chemistry free" messaging claiming that Agfa's "chemistry free plates" were neither free of chemistry nor is the chemistry itself free. The posting triggered many to ask and a few to pose the question on PrintPlanet.com, "what chemicals are in that 'chemistry free' solution?" Agfa replied with "Agfa rolled-out the Azura implementation with the preservative gum as the only 'chemical.'" Our point exactly...

Just this week, Simon Nias of PrintWeek reported that "Fujifilm will replace 'misleading' chemistry-free tag with 'low-chemistry' for plate ranges". Kudos to Fujifilm for challenging the credentials of "chemistry free"..

Agfa - the cat's out of the bag. It's your turn to revamp your misleading marketing slogans and be honest to your customers.

At a recent DM News event in New York City, the Global Creative Jam, I showed a roomful of designers the only digital, tactile printing available on the market. Their response was overwhelming, with comments such as "This is just what my client/job/campaign, needs!" Everyone at the event was talking about feeling the fuzz of a peach, the wood grain of a hardwood floor, the softness of a flower petal. They were talking about Kodak NexPress Dimensional Printing.

When industry expert Frank Romano saw the solution, he started talking about it too. Frank immediately saw the merit and value this solution brings to print service providers. He said, "It adds a new capability to what they're doing. It gives them a new revenue stream. It gives them a new opportunity for new business. And that's what it's all about. In this economy, we need to find new business and value added printing, and Kodak Dimensional Printing does that." Hear what else Frank had to say in this video.



Kodak NexPress Dimensional Printing is a unique Kodak solution and it's one way to make print even more powerful. It's just one of the applications made possible by the Kodak Fifth Imaging Unit Solutions, including clear coating, watermarking, glossing, protection coating, and MICR. All add value to the printed piece.

Differentiation... it's a beautiful thing, especially when it provides additional value for your clients and more business for you. It's Kodak innovation at work for your business.

It certainly is an exciting time to be a part of the world of flexographic printing. Print results are being achieved today that would have been determined unimaginable by this process as recently as a couple years ago. Even more exciting is to be a part of the team that is making this possible...with the award- winning Kodak Flexcel NX Digital Flexographic System.



I had the opportunity in early March to be onsite for the printing of the Canadian Printer magazine "over-cover" at the Cenveo McLaren Morris and Todd facility in Mississauga, Ontario. Given the rare chance to demonstrate the current capabilities of the flexo print process compared side by side to the traditional offset-printed magazine cover, the enhanced reproduction gamut enabled by the Flexcel NX system proved itself once again!

With challenging four color process graphics expertly prepared by the staff at Autumn Graphics, and printing on what can be considered as a somewhat unforgiving substrate, it was immediately recognized by everyone present how quickly the job came up to and fell into color match. Of greater significance is that the graphics were output with screening of 20 micron stochastic on the outside and 200 line AM on the inside-all reproduced in four color process and printed in-line over a printed white. Attempting to pull something like this off before the introduction of Flexcel NX in this industry would likely have seldom been considered possible.

What had been scheduled for the possibility of an all-day "tweak and coax" was wrapped up and mission accomplished in only a couple hours. A great deal of the credit for this, naturally, goes to Marcelo Marziali and his staff at Cenveo, as well as Ben Abray and the folks at Autumn. While it does require the right combination of components to accomplish these types of results, Flexcel NX proved to be the enabler.

With Flexcel NX providing the capability for expanded tonal range and repeatable, consistent results, flexo is reaching uncharted waters in competing with offset and gravure on a daily basis and providing even greater value for our customers.