The EFI Engage General Session on Monday, Feb. 1 featured Toby Weiss, EFI’s senior vice president/general manager of Fiery, whose presentation was titled, “A Colorful Year with a Bright Future.” His presentation provided insights into new developments in color technology and output.
These are the highlights from Weiss’s keynote, which should take you two minutes or less to read.
Two Points
“Color is a one-way street. As we get better with color and imaging technology, we can’t go back. Every time there is a technical innovation that makes color or imaging seem better, it is adapted. And looking back at the old technology, we can’t look at it the same way anymore.”
“Color matters. Better color, better quality imaging that we see almost all the time makes a big difference. It matters because it evokes our emotions. It matters because it helps make purchasing decisions. And if you are in the print and imaging business, it matters because it will help make more profits.”
An Endless Amount of Color for Textile Printing
“Today with print on demand digital technology, you have an almost endless amount of color [options]—ways [to add color to] a particular piece of clothing. Clothing is not going to back from having rich colors and being exciting and vibrant back to the dull colors. As clothing gets more advanced, you’ll see brighter colors, colors that couldn’t be made before.”
More Reasons Why Color Matters
“When you go into a high-end car dealership you see a beautiful brochure. It’s not just because they want the colors in the brochure to match the color of the car. They want to evoke the emotions that put you over the line to be able to make a purchase. It doesn’t have to be a car dealership. Critical color matters in almost any business presentation. This matters no matter you’re printing. If the quality of the print is better people will notice and they will think more highly of the quality of the content as well.”
An Expanding Color Gamut
“Some of that new technology we’ve seen in print include fluorescent colors and metallics—gold and silver. One of the most exciting colors is white for digital print. To be able to lay down white toner opens up the entire world of printing on black or dark media. It also allows us to print shiny and metallic colors by printing on silver or gold metallic media and putting a white on top of it and CMYK after that. There has been more advancement with clear, not just clear coats, but being able to pile up clear to give a textured feel.”
“We’re probably going to look back at print prior to the year 2020 and it’s going to be very noticeable that they didn’t have fluorescent colors, they didn’t have white toner, they didn’t have shiny and metallic.”
EFI Color Technology Innovations
“The color scientists and computer scientists we have at EFI worked for almost five years to release Fiery Edge, a new technology that challenges the color gamut…it’s the difference between a good print and an okay print.”
“When you think of a digital front end and all the settings, it has to have some knowledge of what is being printed. Is it coming from an RGB space, does it have spot colors, does it have transparencies, does it have fine lines and text and graphics? Fiery Job Expert looks at a PDF file, sees the attributes of those files, and uses intelligence to automatically print it with the right settings. That will allow the right print to come out the first time without any experimentation. That is the power of having digital expertise built into your color server. The settings are still there, and we will continue to expand on them for the professionals, but for the rest of us, who don’t have the time or resources to do it, Fiery is going to make the right choice for you for that print.”
“We have an application called ColorGuard that makes sure you are getting the best color and the most consistent color all the time. Shops are using this to make sure their processes are followed, but they are also using this to help sell their products to their customers.”
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