Many of you who were lucky enough to visit drupa this year probably had the same feeling that I always get. When faced with the mind-blowing array of shiny new hardware for this and that application my head starts to spin. It's very easy to see and understand the appeal of all this exciting stuff that will revolutionize print, and in many ways, it is already doing so.

As a 'plate man' you could think it was all a bit intimidating, being told that the day after tomorrow the world as we know it would be no more. 'Offset is dead, long live digital printing' they cry. Well, this may be a bit premature but you get the idea. Does all this intimidate me? No, bring it on I say. Kodak has some great digital printing solutions that are offset class, and the new technology shown at drupa promised even more exciting developments in the near future.

Suppliers to the Offset Printing Industry are not standing still, however. Press manufacturers are driving offset printing costs further down by offering presses in wider formats (more pages per cycle), with more automation (less labor and downtime), and with more speed (higher productivity). Some are expanding into the small format offset area and are reducing the number of wasted sheets at start-up, hence making offset more competitive for short-run high quality jobs.

And in prepress for offset, Kodak just took the benchmark up a peg or two.

If you went up to one of those shiny new platesetters (like the Magnus 800 Z speed running 60 B1 plates per hour) on our booth, and had a look inside, you would have seen Kodak's latest digital offset plate, the Kodak Electra XD Thermal Plate that was formally launched at the show. And, we're pretty excited about it.

So 'what's so special about this plate' I hear you ask. Well, quite a lot actually. Its list of technical performance features is impressive. It's FM10 rated, very robust on-press, has fast exposure, processing speeds, and many good things that help you get the print quality and productivity you need. But that's not the main benefit. The real value to the printer from the Electra XD Plate is exceptional dot stability throughout the whole production process, and especially throughout the print run. This dot stability translates to minimized intervention on press to correct for plate wear effects. It means fewer plate remakes are likely to be necessary and therefore saves time and money with press downtime and restart waste. It's about maintaining colour quality from first to last sheet. It's what actually pays the printer's wages and where money is really made and lost. So, how big a benefit is this in real terms? Well, we think it's potentially huge. But don't take my word for it, give it a try and experience it for yourself. Join the growing band of satisfied Electra XD Plate printers.

My marketing colleagues said 'tell them about the printer in Sweden who ran 1.8 million copies unbaked, or the French printer who achieved 4.5 million baked, or the guy in Belgium printing FM10 and getting real benefits on press'. Well I guess I just did, but I prefer to under-sell and over-deliver.  Anyway, it's not the exceptional results that excite me so much but the fact that I know that all printers may benefit from this new plate technology, no matter what their resolution or run length or productivity requirement.

Judging from the feedback we have had from the market so far, we seem to be 'striking a chord' with many printers. I have no doubt that you will be hearing a lot more about this plate in the future.

On October 12, Kodak successfully introduced the new Trendsetter News Platesetter family at IFRA Expo 2009. Since Trendsetter News saw the first light of day at IFRA Expo 2000 as the first daylight-safe newspaper computer-to-plate (CTP) device, it has been and continues to be a very popular CTP device used every day to make plates for millions of newspapers with leading-edge quality from "O Liberal" in the Amazon, to "Het Laatste Nieuws" in the heart of Europe to "China Daily" in Beijing.

The latest enhancements for the new Trendsetter News were well received by customers and resulted in a number of orders signed at IFRA.

Hanuaer Anzeiger, just outside of Frankfurt, Germany, purchased two Trendsetter News S-AL units and will be printing their newspapers before year-end with plates imaged on their newly purchased thermal CTP's.

As this customer experienced firsthand, the Trendsetter News Platesetter's new compact footprint makes it easier than ever to fit parallel plate lines in small prepress rooms, and they will be making plates within days after rolling the equipment into the room.

Thanks to the thousands of customers worldwide who have successfully used Trendsetter CTP's every day for over a decade!

Just 6 weeks or so after the first visit to South America and Colombia I find myself back in the beautiful country with interesting and beautiful people. It is a visit that opens up my eyes even further to the changes and potential that this will become a power house for packaging, and particularly flexible packaging in the future. To reinforce the warning that the US&C risks falling behind countries like Colombia when we start to come out of recession, the first orders for Flexcel NX Systems in Colombia were taken, all into printers, both narrow and wide web. Combining the newest equipment with the best in plate technology will allow these printers to easily move forward and reinforce their positions as suppliers to the biggest brand owners.

One of the examples of where the newest press combines with the newest press, was a print trial on an OMET XFLEX. The XFLEX won the FFTA Technical Innovation Award last year, as did the Flexcel NX System this year. This is the first time I have seen these two industry leading innovations for Flexo together, and I have to say it was a beauty to behold. The speed to color, ease to change anilox rolls, print cylinders between jobs, ink tray loading unloading, minimal web path during the job, auto registration all worked simply and perfectly. The printer actually setup the first job twice, to prove to the prepress manager, and just to confirm that the press and plates combination really was so fast coming to commercially acceptable print together.



The picture in this Blog comes from a visit to the old Spanish capital in Colombia, and we have titled it "The 3 Tom's Looking For Dr John", where I shot a panoramic, and Tom accidentally managed to move into every shot, looking a different direction each time! It is a little freaky in some ways, but an interesting shot, automatically produced using a Kodak Easyshare M1093IS. The other lesson from that trip is distance as the crow flies is not important, how big a mountain you have to go up and down the side of controls travel time, and the degree of headache at the other end!

Colombia seems to be the country in South America with the highest penetration of traditional digital flexo plates, high percentage of Comexi wide web presses, and a smaller percentage of gravure to flexo.

Chile on the other hand was very different. From the flight from hell overnight Sunday with all the families returning from vacations, to arriving at the hotel to go to bed in the dark, and the getting out of bed at noon for the first appointment, to opening the curtains to see for the first time the snow covered Andes mountains seemingly a few blocks away, that was a real WOW sight to wake to!

The Flexo industry in Chile was different, far fewer CTP for Flexo, about 20% of Colombia, much more analog, very good analog, more Italian presses than anything, and a higher percentage of gravure than in Colombia. But here again a market ready to transition, Chile is a big exporter, so their packaging appears on our shelves all of the time, and they will continue to grow this trend. Here converting Flexo is really also going after gravure conversion, so the densities that can be produced with as few colors as possible is important.

As I visit super markets in other countries, that gets really interesting trying to explain you are "just looking" with a loop when you don't speak Spanish, it is clear that there are some significant market differences too. Quantities are smaller, many weekly instead of monthly purchases as in US, more flexible packaging, stronger brighter colors, more competition for sales. You come to the conclusion that the packaging in Latin America is at least as good and in most cases better than the majority in the US today. This too will help understand how they can become a threat to the US producers.

The next issue of the blog will come from Argentina and Uruguay, and my verdict to date on the beef, and who for Latin America reins supreme!