Converting Magazine

Prepress Primer

• Prepress Primer
  Alex Hamilton, Consulting Technical Editor, 12/01/2005
  In his seminal book titled Crossing the Chasm, author Geoffry Moore argues that any new technology goes through four phases of market acceptance. To be a successful product from a business point of view, it must mature technologically and financially (costs must decline) to expand its appeal from a relatively small group of "early adopters" to the mainstream marketplace. More
• Focus on Prepress Technology
  Alex Hamilton, Consulting Technical Editor, 12/01/2004
  Whereas commercial printing workflow is characterized by a high volume of jobs, each of which consists of multiple pages, the technical complexity of these jobs is relatively limited. That is, most work is produced using process-color builds, with high-end jobs adding a fifth, sixth or (infrequently) seventh color, and some have coatings or varnishes. More
• Focus on Prepress Technology
  Alex Hamilton, Consulting Technical Editor, 215/247-3461, info@candcc.com, 09/01/2004
  Twenty-two minutes versus three hours. Forget about everything else. That's the amount of time it takes to get up to color using digital-flexo plates versus analog. Sure, there'll be variations and not every printer will match those numbers. But even at 44 min. versus two hours, digital plates offer a lot more billable press time. More
• What's new in digital color proofing for package printing?
  Alex Hamilton, Consulting Technical Editor, 215/247-3461, info@candcc.com, 06/01/2004
  Digital proofing is going mainstream, but it's not as cheap or easy to implement as you think. In the good old days, proofing was an arduous task. Take the design files, make film separations, mix up Cromalinw powders for the spot colors, contact them to donor sheets and make up a proof. It cost a lot in terms of time and money, but you got a very accurate representation of what the final packa... More
• Prepress Primer
  Alex Hamilton, 02/01/2004
  For most people, the topic of output screening is like those high-school trigonometry courses that made your eyes glaze over. Yet, beyond crunching the numbers to determine where the spots and dots are going to go, output screening actually has relevance to the rest of the package-printing process—especially the bottom line. More