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Focus on Imaging 2008 - part 2 of 1 2

by Mike McNamee Published 01/04/2008

X-Rite called interested journalists to a briefing, held under nondisclosure agreement for a new product called Colormunki. We can now reveal this as a 'round-trip' colour management system for colour matching between print and screen. It is especially targeted at the social, wedding, and event photographers with simplicity of operation being the keynote. It follows a trend of gradually removing the black magic from getting your colours correct. We hope to follow up the product as it becomes available for review. As part of our feature on matt papers we swept the hall for evidence.

We chanced upon 'Magiclee' offering a range of 15 surfaces, mainly for large-format uses, although they have some A3+ sheets along with their roll media stretching from 17 inches to 50 inches. Talking of stretching we shared the aisle with Tabmaster and had them show us their canvas stretching 'gear', very simple and like many simple ideas it works well.

Hahnemuhle were showing their Bamboo media in some prominence (see review in this issue), Fotospeed had a nice new stand - an oasis of D65 in the sodium-lit desert that is the NEC. You only realise how bad the light is when you flood an area with corrected daylight - we measured it as around 2000 Kelvin while we were calibrating on the Epson stand, goodness knows what the spectra looks like (think pink and spikey, a bit like one of the girls on the Lowepro stand!). Permajet were hosting Nik Filters along with their new set of canvas media (see review in this issue).

The new Ultra Gloss Innova canvas was introduced to the general public (we all saw it at the Convention) along with their new RIP solution, called 'Focus'. Although the Portrait Professional software is not new to our readers, we had the opportunity to meet up with the company CEO and Chief Scientist; our follow-up breakfast meeting was a fascinating discussion on the quantification of female beauty which was vastly more entertaining than the title might suggest!

Studio Depthprint was a concept that we had heard about but not actually handled - they advertised in the last issue on page 32. Working only on printers with a straight-line media feed, a die-cut canvas-bonded sheet is printed onto, then knocked out, folded and voila you have a box-mounted canvas. It takes seconds to construct and should find a following in the mid-stream market (pets, schools, events and the like). Prices range from £9.29 for a 10x8 inch to £36.82 for a 24x30 inch (so pay attention when you set up the printing!).

We had some interesting discussions with HP on their Indigo printing system. This is now installed at a number of album-making companies and was impressive in the sample books we were shown. They also featured a few new large-format papers, along with their comprehensive range of media.

Overall then it was a busy and reasonably successful Focus for the majority of the trade and hopefully the visitors; there was plenty to see and do. Next year we can look forward to the 20th anniversary, is it really that long since we used to trek across the Pennines, in

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1st Published 01/04/2008
last update 09/12/2022 14:54:22

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