Here are some of the more interesting things we saw online in the print/design/graphics world this week:

• Inkjet Printers Cooking Up Human Tissue at Wake Forest University - databaazar blog
• The Recruitment Crisis - The Print CEO Blog
• The Relevance of Information - The Digital Nirvana Blog
• Bringing history online, one newspaper at a time - Google Blog
• Designing for Print - Setting Up Crops and Bleed - Spoon Graphics blog
  

The games are in the final stretch now and we are in full swing with producing photo books here in the MPC. We have setup a workflow for the professional photographers to take their top shots of the games and produce their own photo book. Some of the photographers have made a book of their own experiences in Beijing; others have designed books of their best sport action shots and other have focused their book on a particular athlete or event. All have been excited to get a book off the NexPress which highlights their work and times at the games.

The workflow: The Kodak Help desks provides a coupon and instruction sheet for a photo book to the photographer, they then go to any of the 100+ MAC or PC machines here in the Kodak Imaging Center. They open the My Photo Books application by Digilabs to create and design their book. The application allows them to quickly select up to 240 images and it then automatically creates a book layout. The photographer can then easily make edits to the layout with their own design ideas.

 We have been getting very positive feedback from the photographers on the ease and power of the application. After they are happy with their design they place the order and the system collects their name and coupon number. A print ready PDF is created and posted to the server in the Kodak Digital Print Center. We do a quick review and send it to the NexPress via Prinergy V5.0. We then finish it off with a custom Olympic hardcover from Unibind and get it back to the Kodak Help Desk. The photographers retrieve their book less than 24 hrs have they submitted the design.

Brenda putting together a book for a photographer

The machine has passed 500K pages printed and we will have a big push of work to get to the final ceremonies. Still lots of excitement and activity here in Beijing. We got off to see the Great Wall and a few other sites this week and shopping is always interesting here in China. We are all looking forward to our arrival back home but for now we still have few more books to produce.

For some, the term "old technology" resonates a bad feeling about a product. For those who keep up with all technology aspects around them, this is not necessarily true. The internal combustion engine is old technology that has survived for over 100 years.

Following this concept, Kodak makes a Premier Digital Color Half-Tone Proofer for the graphics industry. Even though it is based on so called "old technology" ( I prefer to say we were way ahead of our time), the Approval NX Digital Half-Tone Proofer is still the standard of half-tone proofing for the industry.

The Approval system has images that are so precise that dot-on-dot registration is evaluated with very high power optics to insure reliability and consistency. Look at any magazine with a magnifying glass and you"ll see the same dots as our machine makes.

So you might ask yourself exactly how good this system is? The proofs off the Approval XP4 (initial system) were used as the "visual reference" for Spot Color and N-Color proofing tests at the 2007 IPA Proofing RoundUP. All the other 34 proofers were measured against our hard copy proof. This system also has Gracol and SWOP certifications.

For those of you who never knew, Kodak has been making this product all along. There are also new enhancements for the Packaging market. Our proofs have been laminated to cardboard for boxes, shrink wrap for bottles and metal for cans so customers can see the actual end product. Being able to replicate the final product saves time and money for the customer. We can also create millions of colors.

Did you know Approval proofs are used to make the company's ONE magazine? Many brand owners worldwide specify the need to use proofs from our machine because of it's accuracy.