PRESS RELEASE

It's Time to Reap the Benefits of an End to End Creative Workflow Printing Solution

Marketing is a fundamental part of today's business world. Companies must compete hard to generate sales and retain existing customers. In Europe, 53% of the population still does not use the Internet (Eurobarometer), and only 6.3% of commerce is conducted via the Internet (Forrester). This means that printed material in the form of brochures, mail shots and branded collateral remains one of the most effective modes of communication. In order to be competitive in today's busy marketplace, it is important for companies to focus on branding, design and image.

The Key to Success
Today's printing must function as a precision tool for marketing communication. Printed materials must be accurate, timely and cost effective. Having the right imaging and printing solution in place can help optimise a company's creative workflow, drive time and cost efficiencies, and ensure the highest design work accuracy before going to a full print run. The graphics design industry needs imaging and print solutions which enable it to focus on creativity and ambition.

The Creative Workflow
There are three key stages in the creative workflow:

Technology plays a role at each stage and can help maximise the creative potential by reducing the time, effort and cost spent on issues such as colour accuracy, image quality and speed.

Capture and Creation
Graphic designers and professional photographers need the ability to synthesise input from many different sources and create a distinctive image that conveys a message about the product or company they are representing. An important aspect of the creation process is the generation of a variety of designs or photos that demonstrate different approaches to the product. Creativity cannot be realised without the methods and technology to transport it successfully to its final printed format.

Aspects such as capturing the best light, colour and composition are of the utmost importance to a photographer when producing work. Digital cameras can aid in this step of the creative workflow with their manual overrides, for example the HP Photosmart 945 digital camera allows ease of capture and creation through its one-touch, fully automatic technology. The camera offers a big zoom and sharp pictures, it also offers manual overrides for adding creative touches, such as altering exposure and white balance. It is still important for photographers to be able to proof work, and if needed ensure the colour consistency and accuracy resembles what they intended.

It is here that a bottleneck in the proofing of photo images can occur; photographers need to have the speed and accuracy in producing image quality equal to or above traditional photographic prints. HP's Designjet 30 and 130 provides photographers with the technology to overcome this issue. Designed to ensure colour consistency and accuracy, photographers can utilise the speed of the print outs which measure up to 6 minutes per page at A3 size (using best mode and HP Premium Plus photo media) to benefit their business.

By making this technology available photographers can benefit from skipping the outsourced development stage, shortening deadlines for retouching and colour correcting and rely on the accuracy of prints provided as a colour reference for clients and also to use as a final product.

To aid in the high quality prints available the Designjet range is accompanied by a range of media (HP premium Plus Photo and Proofing Gloss, HP Premium Plus Photo Satin and HP Photo Matte). The glossy and satin media is ideal for photos and the matte is excellent for black and white printing. This new media is perfect for graphic designers, photographers or pre press with a need to have accurate colours, photographic image quality and fade resistant prints. The media is swellable which allows the inks to sit in better and create a 75 year lightfastness.

Designers too can benefit from the colour precision, consistency and range of sizes offered by the HP Designjet 30 and 130 series. An important stage within capture and creation is the concept proof which is checked with the client to ensure the design is moving in the right direction according to design brief.

Proofing
When working through the proofing process from concept to finished artwork, proofing serves the designer three different purposes: - to approve or correct a job before it is printed, to accurately show how the design will be realised when the design is produced, and to form a basis for agreement on what will be produced by the designer, customer and printer.

At each stage of this process, the quality of the document needs to remain accurate both on screen and on paper. Previous proofing methods could not deliver colour accurate copies between designer and client for approval electronically. New end to end digital solution have now been developed for both designers and printers.

On top of HP's software RIPs to provide colour management, Best's Colour Management solutions work together with HP printers to guarantee the specifics of a document do not change significantly whilst the document is in the design stage and when electronically delivered to the printers. The Colour Management solution ensures that the colours being printed by the client are precisely the same as those sent by the designer. Best's Designeredition 4.0 has been developed exclusively to support the HP Designjets 30 and 130.

In addition, HP and GretagMacBeth have collaborated to produce a colourometer that addresses differences between computer hardware. From designer to client the colours shown on screen can differ widely, GretagMacBeth's Eye One Display is placed over a monitor and used in conjunction with software to ensure the same colours can be seen on varying displays. An advancement on this is the Eye One Publish that can collaborate with the printer and media used to allow what is printed to represent exactly what is visualised on screen. This type of technology represents a major breakthrough in the problems caused by different pieces of hardware and media, between designers, clients and production. HP offers the GretagMacBeth Eye One Display in a bundle within the HP Designjet 30 and130 series when sold.

In today's business market, where deadlines for designs and copy acceptance become ever shorter, proofs that are not 100% accurate increase time and costs and can impair a project significantly. To meet this market need, HP has created a new Designjet series that is designed to aid all those parties involved in the design and printing process.

The HP Designjet 30 and HP Designjet 130 are now on offer to facilitate the creative workflow process ensuring designers can rely on their proofs and benefit from a reduction in printing errors. These printers allow for high colour accuracy, professional photo image quality and exceptional fade resistance as well as the ability to print in a variety of sizes from A6 to A3+ and A3 to A1+ respectively.

Colour proofs are an important stage within the creative workflow. For example it is imperative that corporate colours are the exact pantone when printed so that branding and recognition is reinforced. Colour proofs when signed off are a binding document for the print production team to work from. The HP Designjet 30 and HP Designjet 130 are able to produce prints of a quality that is high enough to be used in this way. Pre-press professionals can benefit from the HP Designjet 30 / 130 series through the ability to proof in a 4 up system (the option to print four pages to one sheet of paper) with colour stability being reached between 10 minutes and less than on hour depending on the media.

HP's media is designed to work perfectly with the new HP inks also launched with the Designjet. The new inks offer a fade resistance higher than other dye based inks. Using the ink and paper together is key in the final quality finish.

Production
Once sign off by client has been authorised the pre-press and production teams can now step into the third stage of the creative workflow. The challenges in getting the design through the print run and on time to meet client deadlines can put pressure on budgets. Outsourcing is the norm for ensuring a professional finish. However, to tackle the issue of shipping, storage, deadlines and cost HP have developed a variety of professional printing solutions. The printers range from high quality in-house printers, such as the HP Color LaserJet 9500, to the newly launched commercial digital print presses, such as the HP Digital Press 5000. Designed to combine outstanding colour speed with superior image quality and consistent colour, the HP Color LaserJet 9500 series has been engineered for in-house, short-run printing for up to A3. The LaserJet allows the flexibility to print low print runs in-house rather than outsource to commercial print providers. Ultimately, this gives users more control over quality, content and production time whilst dramatically lowering costs due to increased inventory and waste of off-set printing.

The HP Digital Press 5000 offers higher print quality for large print runs involved in commercial printing. It is ideal for medium to large commercial printers who need quick turnaround on print runs, static and variable data printing with greater substrate flexibility and quicker job switching. It can enable commercial printers to become more competitive and move to profitable, cost effective, short on demand printing. Commercial printers can secure high value growing business opportunities through versioned and variable data print.

An Example of Creative Workflow Excellence
Axel Springer, Europe's largest newspaper publisher uses HP Designjets to proof newspaper advertisements. The company's portfolio includes both "Bild" and "Die Welt", Germany's two leading daily newspapers, as well as their Sunday magazine editions and sister publications "SportBild" and "TierBild".

Bild has 39 different sections with a variety of layouts and printing needs. 5.2 million copies are printed from 17 printing plants around Germany and Europe every night.

To quickly handle the complex proofing involved, Axel Springer uses large format Designjets handling newsprint and inks working from original production files to ensure advertising proofs are the same as what appears on the news stand.

Total Solution
HP is dedicated to giving its customers a "no mistakes" colour experience which not only takes the pain out of colour printing but also offers a colour consistency that was previously only achievable through the laborious and archaic offset production process. HP has the market position to be able to link creation, preparation and production and can deliver the extensive IT backbone to make it all work. HP has invested in identifying the key needs of the graphics professionals. The most important 'feature' professionals are looking for when it comes to imaging and printing solutions, is the colour consistency across their whole workflow. To make products which fit perfectly to the graphics environment it was critical to ensure they were part of the typical workflow.

HP is the first in the market to deliver colour consistency through dedicated products, which provide best in class colour management hard and software components. HP offers product bundles with the appropriate colour consistency/management modules from Gretag Macbeth ranging from Scanjets to digital projectors, photosmart printers, Deskjets, Designjets and LaserJets. All are customised for the respective HP products. The solutions offered from HP gives the creative design industry the freedom and flexibility to print what they want, where they want and when they want using the consistency of colour accuracy across any HP ink, laser, design and Indigo platform.

Together with HP, the creative design market now has an imaging and printing option for professional quality graphic design printing which delivers accurate colour and long-lasting professional image quality.