Xerox Corp.

Having just returned from Chicago, home of the Graph Expo trade show, I must now return to the drudgery of daily work. And right now, that means forecasting the future of the prepress industry. If only prognosticating were easy. Frankly, it's anything but. The data are clearly contradictory. On the one hand, sales are rising (although profits are not) and all the leading researchers seem to agree that this is likely to continue for the foreseeable future. On the other hand, there looms the impact of the Web, which most pundits predict will severely impact commercial printing's future. Yet, if navigating one's way through the crowds tromping

BY CAROLINE MILLER Digital Prinitng is poised to become one of the most powerful tools available to marketers. However, there's one problem. Many of your clients don't fully understand how digital printing can be beneficial to their businesses. It's a hurdle that any digital print provider needs to clear before it can become profitable. But an effective digital print marketing strategy can go a long way to clearing the profitability obstacle. Still, marketing digital printing services requires you to take a different approach than you might with traditional offset printing. Marketing your digital capabilities requires educating your clients about the benefits of digital and also

BY ERIK CAGLE Imagine a superstore that sold all makes and models of commercial printing equipment—from prepress to press and finishing gadgets. Obviously, this store would be rather large, with freight trains taking the place of shopping carts, making it a tad impractical. But that would ruin our story line. Anyway, today is your lucky day. The store is having a CMYK-light special on finishing equipment, and there are collating systems galore to be had at the right price. You take the aisle 1,700 trolley and get off in front of a procession of collating systems looking very nice in their display boxes. Cost

Digital duplicators and production printers are leading the industry down a new path. Find out what solutions are out there. BY CHRIS BAUER Touted by some vendors as the most cost-effective printing method available today, digital duplicating machines have come a long way since their predecessors: mimeograph machines and spirit duplicators. Digital duplicators and high-speed production printers give users a combination of the convenience and simplicity of a copier with the economics and versatility of an offset press. This versatility makes duplicators and production printers ideal products for both short-, medium- and high-volume printing applications, vendors say. Looking back, digital duplicating equipment was not

BY CLINT BOLTE More than 650 vendors were represented in 575 exhibits covering 480,000 net square feet at Chicago's McCormick Place. Only a fraction of the estimated 46,000 in attendance at Graph Expo and Converting Expo 2000 were at DRUPA last May. But those that were may have been startled at the changes and progress of a number of the vendors in only a matter of months. Vendor coalitions, even among competitors, was the clear theme of this, North America's largest graphic communications trade exposition. The initial half dozen e-commerce hubs created much of last year's Graph Expo stir. The e-commerce caldron continues

Tri-State may have grown with technology, but Frank Campagna remains at eye level with his customers. BY ERIK CAGLE Since you are reading this, it can be assumed that you are, in one form or another, a partner in the large chain of worldwide communications. You are a communications provider, directly or indirectly, through the printed or electronic word. Your livelihood depends upon the need for people to relay information, and the ways and means of communication are evolving, changing, taking shape and, in some cases, vanishing quicker than the time it takes to burn a CD. Consider Tri-State Associated Services of Kingston, NY,

Digital Color Graphics does not want to be a six-color operation—just yet. For today, owner John Rosenthal is content aspiring to rule the short-run printing market. BY CAROLINE MILLER It's good to be the king, and that's exactly what John Rosenthal, owner of Digital Color Graphics, wants to be. "I want to become the king of—and the benchmark for—all small printing companies in the country," he states. Still, rising to the top can be a challenge, especially in the crowded and competitive commercial printing market. However, for the past two and a half years, Digital Color Graphics, located in Southampton, PA, a Philadelphia suburb,

It is increasingly difficult to find major vendors that have not jumped onto the XML bandwagon. Adobe, Agfa, Heidelberg and MAN Roland have teamed up to develop the Job Definition Format (JDF) using XML, while CreoScitex and Quark are both building XML-based applications to drive their own systems. In the e-commerce space, printCafe, PrintTalk—a nascent group of firms—and others are building transaction and supply chain management systems based on eXtensible Markup Language. Not to be left out, the on-demand group PODI has published a specification called PPML—Personalized Print Markup Language—based on this spec, and still another industry initiative, called the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP),

There are two major schools of thought that have formed opinions about what happened at DRUPA 2000, held in Dusseldorf, Germany, last May. One theory has it that there were hundreds of new product announcements, some of them very important. The other school says that there were hundreds of new product announcements, none of them of any key significance to the future of printing and publishing. Which one is right? Part of what makes it so difficult to interpret the impact of DRUPA is the sheer scale of the event. Held only once every four or five years, the show is enormous by North

Execs from Dome Printing, Lake County Press, PlanetPrint.com, Graphic Enterprises and R.R. Donnelley & Sons sit down with Printing Impressions to map out the state of color management, PDF, remote proofing, thermal plates and digital asset management. BY CAROLINE MILLER The curtain has closed on DRUPA 2000 and the fairground lights have faded, returning Dusseldorf, Germany, to normal. The grand dame of international shows is over for another four years. But while the steady hum of new presses that once filled the air in Dusseldorf has gone silent, the buzz surrounding much of the technology has increased. That DRUPA buzz will turn