The hottest spring calling for digital proofing

Calling for the spring of digital proofing (1)

in the past decade, domestic digital proofing has experienced a stumbling stage of initial asking for directions and medium-term promotion, and is now growing at an average annual jump rate of 50% to 100%. Looking back on this process, we can see that in today's digital proofing field, the technology is basically mature, new hardware and software products come out in large numbers, and the media publicity is constantly increasing. However, from the current situation of market development, the digital proofing market is not as prosperous as expected by the industry. The China International Printing Technology and Equipment Exhibition (hereinafter referred to as all printing exhibition), which has attracted the attention of the industry, will be held in Shanghai from May 13 to 16, 2003. At that time, many digital proofing hardware and software suppliers and integrators will gather together, looking forward to taking the express train of this year's largest printing exhibition to develop the digital proofing market. What kind of development opportunities will the upcoming all print exhibition bring to digital proofing with its revenue exceeding 200 billion yuan and reaching 220.414 billion yuan? What is the development prospect of digital proofing? With questions, this magazine visited a number of well-known digital proofing suppliers, integrators and experts in the industry, hoping to understand their views on the current situation that digital proofing needs to be equipped with a tensile machine with a large stroke for testing the tensile properties of flexible packaging materials

as an important part and key process link of modern digital prepress system, digital proofing can simulate and match various printing methods such as lithography, embossing, flexo printing, gravure printing, printing and so on. Driven by the global wave of digitalization and networking, digital proofing was first launched in the field of offset plate making. In recent years, although some large-scale offset printing manufacturers have adopted digital proofing systems, their popularity in the field of offset plate making has met with indifference. Yin Youfang, a prepress expert, believes that there are mainly two aspects of resistance

if the direct plate making technology (CTP) can be widely used, digital proofing will be widely used as a necessary condition. But in fact, for users who have not yet introduced direct plate making technology, the idea of most people is that there is no need to eliminate the traditional proofing equipment and increase the burden of adding a digital proofing system

on the other hand, the standardization, standardization and data management of the whole printing process are not in place, which increases the difficulty of digital proofing to simulate a specific printing suitability. Yin Youfang said, "enterprises such as Yachang, Zhonghua business and shengcaihong have their own plate making companies and printing plants. The printing suitability and technical management are relatively stable, and the printing standardization work is done well. Their digital proofing work is carried out very well.". But in fact, such enterprises do not account for the majority in China, and the businesses of more enterprises are separated. The plate making company is only responsible for plate making, and does not care about which printing factory the customer will print in the future; In those small printing plants with unstable printing suitability and poor standardized technology management, most printing masters will be worried about taking the risk of "failure to follow samples", rather than accepting digital proofing samples

proofing technology should be said to be a dark horse in the field of gravure plate making, which also brings the most direct shock to gravure printing. A few years ago, the gravure plate making field has basically realized the full application of digital proofing technology. In the past, the traditional proofing method of film production was adopted, and the electronic engraving was carried out after the approval of the customer; Nowadays, due to the cost pressure of proofing, gravure printing adopts film free engraving similar to offset CTP, which makes the application of digital proofing technology inevitable. The gravure industry first used iris of Cleo for digital proofing. In the past two years, Epson and HP products have also gradually penetrated into the gravure plate making field. After continuous technical improvement, the sample is closer to the effect of gravure ink. At present, the digital proofing system integrated by German color tuner and Epson is widely used in gravure printing

1 The obsolescence of concepts and systems is an obstacle to the popularization of digital proofing. Some printing plants are accustomed to self-esteem as processing enterprises, and their service awareness is weak. Often because they do not have the production conditions of digital proofing, they fall into the embarrassing situation of "how to print only one sample sheet" and "how to do if the electronic document of that night comes out tomorrow". On the other hand, some state-owned printing enterprises have no intention of technological revolution and improving quality. In contrast, private and joint ventures are more aware of service and have a keen eye for investing in new technologies, and advocate market competition mechanism to promote efficiency

2. There is a big gap between customers' understanding of the product and the actual ability of the product. Customers always hope that all problems can be solved by digital proofing technology, even if the problem is not here. Digital proofing is only a part of the digital workflow. To solve the problems in the whole printing process through it is bound to "carve a boat and seek a sword". Color is the concept of the whole process. The back-end printing is unstable. Without the close cooperation between the front and back processes, the front-end proofing will be meaningless