#30: Print Oasis ‘06 Wrap-up

First, I will be delaying my thoughts on GRACoL 7 for a week or two so that I can address more timely topics like a wrap-up of my thoughts and observations at Print Oasis last week in Las Vegas. Let me begin by saying that the conference was very well attended; 500+ corporate print buyers, agencies, and creative people. Most of the other exhibitors were printers, web-to-print portal providers, and one other RIP manufacturer besides AbsoluteProof who shared a booth with us.

(Opening night of Print Oasis features a “hat party” in the exhibit area. Our hat theme was beer.)

By sharing a booth with AbsoluteProof, I expanded upon the insight I have been gaining about how corporate print buyers, ad agencies, and creative types view color. Trust me when I tell you that by and large they truly do work in a world of pleasing color which causes “our” side of the fence nightmares as the creative idea enters the print space. While at the show I heard the words “proof” and “color laser” in the same sentence way too many times. The gamut and color consistency of a “color laser” will cause nothing but problems for those of us who operate in the print space.

At the very least the conference organizers recognize this situation. Two of the education sessions focused specifically on Color Proofing. Rod Rogge of ColorMetrix attended these two sessions, and reported back to me that there was a high desire on the part of the session attendees to understand color managed proofing. The session leader even suggested that the very first thing all of the attendees needed to do was purchase a spectrophotometer. (note: not one instrument manufacturer attended the show, and I believe we had the only instrument on the show floor in our booth.)

I also observed a high degree of interest in the AbsoluteProof hardcopy inkjet proofing solution. I believe that the interest of the attendees focused around several key features of the AbsoluteProof solution;

• Expanded gamut with unique orange and green ink set that allows 90% of the Pantone colors to be produced within 2 Delta E. (Pleasing color or not, the attendees know what color they want)
• Ability to run on a Mac (many agencies have only Macs)
• Inexpensive remote proof option
• True dot proof or contone

AbsoluteProof USA has been bundling the ColorMetrix ProofPass.com solution with almost every RIP install for over a year. During the show they stressed the ability to do remote diagnostics of print/color related problems with the ProofPass.com solution to be invaluable.

Coming next(probably)…Jim Raffel‚Äôs thoughts on GRACoL 7