Seybold San Francisco--Internet Solutions Dominate

BY CAROLINE MILLER

Seybold San Francisco 1999 was the Internet's coming out party. Seybold San Francisco 2000 saw the Internet firmly ensconced as the belle of the ball. The dotcom companies such as Printable, ImageX.com and Noosh proved their staying power with announcements of new releases, partnerships and upgrades. The Moscone Center was also the staging area for the debut of new dotcoms such as ProfileCity.com, an Internet-based ICC profiling service.

It is obvious that the World Wide Web is here to stay as Seybold saw a multitude of other companies leveraging the power of the Internet to provide solutions such as remote proofing, collaboration and digital asset management solutions. Printing Impressions takes a look at some of the new technologies making headlines at Seybold.

Remote Proofing
RealTimeImage's new remote proofing suite, RealTimeProof.com, generated a great amount of interest at Seybold this year. RealTimeProof is a complete online proofing system with full remote soft and hard proofing capabilities that are combined with an interactive communications tool. RealTimeImage's pixels-on-demand technology, which is the platform for the RealTimeProof suite, facilitates progressive on-demand image streaming that quickly transmits images as users zoom in, pan or scroll—enabling 1:1 zoom ratio and higher. RealTimeProof enables users to view large production files in real time. RealTimeImage's pixels-on-demand technology file types remain native and the data is not re-interpreted, altered or changed.

Color Management
One of the more unique dotcom solutions unveiled at Seybold was ProfileCity.com. ProfileCity's system offers two approaches to color output. The first method involves users printing two color targets on their own equipment in their actual working environment. The first color target helps the customer and ProfileCity to analyze the printing system and optimize its setup. Each target is then sent to the ProfileCity color lab for measurement. The linearized custom profiles, built for the user's specific media, printer, printer settings and other adjustments, is returned to the customer via e-mail.

A second method allows professional users with their own measurement devices to print and measure a pair of ProfileCity targets, and uploads the data directly to the ProfileCity Website, using ProfileCity's ChromaCatcher self-measurement utility. ProfileCity will then utilize the measurement data for custom linearization and to prepare the finished profile. The linearized, custom profile is returned to the customer via e-mail.

ProfileCity's basic service relies on X-Rite's Spectrofiler color measurement technology to generate ICC profiles, which are then e-mailed to clients. ProfileCity's ChromaCatcher allows X-Rite color measurement instruments to send colorimetric data uploads directly to ProfileCity's ICC color proofing engine on the Internet. "ProfileCity.com goes far beyond earlier color management systems by allowing users to obtain the highest quality ICC profiles at the lowest cost and with the least amount of hassle," contends ProfileCity.com Spokesman John Fitzpatrick.

File Transmission
FileFlow, a Norwegian company, made its presence known with its FastSend and FastStore online services. FileFlow is relatively new to the North American scene and is viewed as a competitor to Wam!Net. FastSend enables the secure transmission of documents at higher speeds than traditional FTP or e-mail by reducing file size to speed transmission. FastSend's compression and transmission technology can be used with files of any size or format across a standard Internet connection. While based on open file formats, FastSend also takes advantage of FileFlow's proprietary image compression technology to develop still-image compression format. FileFlow's FAST Image Transfer (FIT) format produces significantly smaller file sizes than the equivalent JPEG file, requiring less disk space, reducing download time, bandwidth cost and server loads. The FIT format uses only a single image file for both thumbnail and full-size image creations, and supports spatial scaling of displayed images and a variety of color models such as gray, RGB, CMYK and L*a*b. FastStore also provides off-site archiving and access to digital images.

New ASP Offering
Stepping into the Application Service Provider (ASP) ring this year is IKON with its new offering, Digital Express 2000. Although scheduled for delivery in January, early adopters include iPrint, an online print shop, and Fatbrain.com, a Web-based corporate information management company. Digital Express will provides printers a way to offer their customers the ability to acquire, store, query, retrieve, manage, manipulate and display digital images and documents. Digital Express also offers printers access to IKON's network of digital print production hubs or any other third-party printing resources, to facilitate distribute-and-print capability for geographically dispersed customers. At the same time, printers can maintain direct relationships with print buyers though the private label feature. Printers will be able to blend Digital Express options with the look of their existing Websites.

Digital Asset Management
Imation demonstrated the enhanced capabilities of its Media Manager. "The newly expanded Media Manager system brings the integration of digital asset management capabilities and other key workflow applications together in a tighter, more efficient manner than other solutions on the market," explains John Bredesen, project manager, Imation Color Technologies.

With the integration of advanced, new software, Media Asset Manager is able to deliver new features such as automated Web templates, dynamic catalog page population, format-on-demand, e-catalog publishing and auto-name assembly. It also allows certified Imation Media Manager value-added resellers to more easily customize and extend the system, offering rapid, scalable development and the high-end security needed for e-business and enterprise applications.

Prepress Solutions
Also unveiled at Seybold San Francisco was Xinet's WebNative 3.0, which has been re-engineered and offers a variety of new capabilities. A QuarkXPress preview feature allows users to see a multi-page QuarkXPress document on their Web browser. By clicking on any previewed image within the document, the user gets information about the image, such as its size. Another click provides a larger preview of the image and displays any "metadata" stored within the image. The Xinet WebNative XT extension further enhances multi-site QuarkXPress production by allowing users to drag-and-drop images displayed on the Web directly into their documents.

A new image ordering option allows users to specify format, color space and resolution of images so they will already be appropriate for their current user when they are downloaded. Images can also be scaled easily, cropped and encoded with ICC profiles for color-corrected proofing.

What's New in PDF?
CreoScitex introduced PDFSep2Comp 1.5, the newest version of the Acrobat plug-in that enables prepress professionals to transform their color-separated PDF files into composite documents. Sep2Comp transforms a color-separated PDF file output from page layout applications into a composite, live document that can be edited and manipulated in the same manner as a PDF file. Version 1.5 offers users a wide variety of features. A preview feature allows for the inspection of overprints prior to merging, then pre-separated files into a composite document.

The plug-in also loads and saves custom inks, offers full access to PANTONE color libraries and allows users to maintain PostScript-level compatibility by either converting spot colors to process or leaving them as separate objects. PDF Sep2Comps is also available with the SCS plateview option. This features the powerful separation viewer plug-in component from Prinergy 2.0.