Hamilton--Glimpses of the Future

When I was six years old, a World's Fair was held in Flushing, NY. Companies such as General Motors sponsored pavilions that showed how we would travel in the 21st century. And Bell Telephone showed phones with television screens. Of course, much of what was shown never came to pass. However, many other things that were pure fantasia did turn into reality.

In many ways, this month's DRUPA is exactly the same thing, only with all the exhibits dedicated to printing and publishing.

For those of us who have experienced only a "traditional" trade show, it's hard to describe just how large this quinten-nial event really is. With 18 halls, all of which are about the same size as Chicago's McCormick Place North, there is absolutely no way a single person can begin to do more than sample the fare. In fact, just walking from Hall 1 to Hall 8—they're arranged in a large oval—is a 30-minute ordeal, even with the motorized sky-walks (the sort of thing envisioned by that World's Fair) that crisscross the fair grounds.

Yet the real question is: Why would an American printer or prepress company executive travel all the way to Germany when Graph Expo is just around the temporal corner in September?

This highlights the essence of DRUPA. Clearly, printers and prepress folks don't go to DRUPA to check out potential machinery, hardware and software. For that, shows like Graph Expo are fine, and certainly more accessible.

No, DRUPA is about seeing where the printing industry is headed and will likely be in about five years. In fact, a large percentage of the technologies on display at DRUPA won't even be available for at least another year or two. And some will never make it to commercial availability at all, based on feedback garnered from the global printing community.

DRUPA is an event where R&D meets the real world and printing suppliers can validate their hunches as to what will be their next generation of successful new products.

So why should anyone get all excited about seeing canned demos of technologies that, at best, won't be available for a few years?

Because it's the only venue where you can begin to map out a long-term strategy for technology investments. To be sure, the map will provide incomplete and occasionally erroneous directions, but it's better than going on hunches alone. And since everyone is pretending to see the future, the collective wisdom—and folly—actually provides its own measure of reason from which to judge what you see on the show floor.

Not only that, but DRUPA is the only trade show where all the vendors pull out all the stops. PRINT is big. IPEX is big, IGAS is big. But none of these "global" print exhibitions is even close when it comes to capturing the attention—and pocketbook—of the vendor community. While elaborate booths and great parties are nice touches, they are just the frosting. The cake is on the floor itself in the numerous configurations that will be running live for more than two weeks.

The bottom line is that there is no other single venue where a printer or prepress specialist could ever hope to see and compare so many different systems. Actually, the problem for most printers is that they just don't have enough time, energy or mental capacity to take in as much information as the vendor community wants to provide. After five or six days, the feet are worn out and the mental storage disks filled to capacity. Videocassettes provide some off-line storage, but not nearly enough.

Whereas computer-to-plate imaging was the highlight of DRUPA 95, it is likely that direct-to-press will command considerable attention at DRUPA 2000. Not only will a variety of on-press imaging systems be demonstrated by the major vendors, it's also likely that there will be some interesting demonstrations by nontraditional press suppliers such as Indigo, Xeikon and Xerox.

This year's fair will also show the progress—or lack thereof—of CIP3. The idea of transforming printing from a craft into a manufacturing process has been around for quite some time, but it hasn't been able to progress too far to date. Ink key downloads are definitely a step in the right direction, but just one step.

Hopefully, we will see more activity in the bindery, as finishing equipment vendors take advantage of folding and cutting information to automatically set up their equipment. If printing is going to remain competitive in this cyber century, the entire process must be streamlined through automation.

Frankly, while prepress and pressroom technologies have commanded more than their fair share of attention, the bindery is really the area where there is the most room for digital technologies to make significant improvements in most printing plants' capacity.

Adding fuel to the fire, initiatives such as CIP3 are now being complemented—or will they be supplanted?—by numerous e-commerce solutions that have quickly become part of the printing industry.

And, best of all, once the day is done (and before, for many attendees), you get to wander along the Rhine and sample the local fare, which includes excellent bier and 246 varieties of pork.

—Alex Hamilton

About the Author
Alex Hamilton, a former technical editor with Printing Impressions, is president of Computers & Communications Consulting, which specializes in digital technologies for printing and publishing. He can be reached at (215) 247-3461 or by e-mail at alexh@candcc.com.