[INTRODUCTION]
[0:00:00] DC: This podcast conference is sponsored by Fiery, the leading provider of digital front ends and workflow solutions for the global printing industry. Discover how Fiery can help you power up your presses at Fiery.com and through the links in the show notes.
It takes the right skills and the right innovation to design and manage meaningful print marketing solutions. Welcome to Podcasts From the Printerverse, where we explore all facets of print and marketing that create stellar communications and sales opportunities for business success. I’m your host, Deborah Corn, the Intergalactic Ambassador to the Printerverse. Thanks for tuning in. Listen long and prosper.
[EPISODE]
[0:00:48] DC: Welcome to the Fiery Podcast Conference, a four-part series crafted for print professionals eager to elevate their operations. We’re going to discuss the transformative role of digital front ends in modern printing, highlighting how they can streamline workflows, enhance color accuracy, and boost overall productivity. Whether you’re looking to simplify complex tasks, optimize your print processes, or explore new growth opportunities, this Fiery Conference series offers valuable perspectives and strategies to stay ahead in the ever-changing landscape of print technology. My co-host for the conference is Pat McGrew, Managing Director of McGrew Group, and co-host of the Print Report Series, playing on Podcasts From the Printerverse. Hello, Pat.
[0:01:37] PM: Hello, Deborah. This is such an exciting thing to be doing with the team from Fiery, because so many people have Fiery technology and they don’t even know it. So, let me explain why that’s relevant. If you print using digital devices and it doesn’t matter whether they’re document producing devices, commercial print producing devices, wide format producing devices, they’re all manner of devices that are driven by Fiery.
A digital front end, a DFE is that linking point between the file that got created, how it needs to be processed in order for the actual marking device to do its job. When we say marking device, what we mean is that wide format device that’s sitting on your shop floor or that giant document producing machine that’s sitting in your print shop. The digital front end is where the magic happens. It takes the inbound, most times these days, PDF file, although it could be a TIFF file, it could be any number of things. It turns it into the information that is needed by the print heads in the digital device or the fuser system, the marking system in a toner-based device, and allows it to put the right colors in the right places so you get what it is you designed. I mean, it sounds pretty simple, but there’s a heck of a lot of technology to do it.
Over the years, Fiery has been, I wouldn’t say, they’ve been sneaky, but they’ve been amazing at their ability to get into just about every vendor and get onto their devices because it’s a common understanding, if you are a customer and you have a Fiery digital front end. Over the years, we’ve all learned how they behave, we learn what they do, and we’ve watched them continue to expand, and grow as the industry has expanded, and grown, and the expectations have changed. I think that that kind of lays the groundwork. With that, I’ll let you roll us into the amazing Toby Weiss, and we will get started.
[0:03:49] DC: Yes. This is also a full circle moment for me, as I mentioned to you when we were going to do this podcast. When I was a print customer and going to all the print shops, I saw Fiery everywhere. I was like, “Wow, this Fiery thing is –” I thought it was the press. I had no idea that it was the digital front end of it until I kind of crossed over to the dark side here. But to me, this is a giant brand. So, I’m thrilled to the death to be working with Fiery on this conference.
The first session is called DFE or DIY, all the things that you didn’t know your printers could do. We are joined by Toby Weiss. He is the CEO of Fiery and a transformative force in the digital print industry. With over 25 years of leadership across tech, security, and imaging, Toby guided Fiery through its strategic separation from EFI and its acquisition by Seiko Epson Corporation. Under his leadership, Fiery continues to innovate in digital front ends, and workflow solutions, empowering printers worldwide to achieve exceptional color and performance. Welcome, Toby.
[0:05:04] TW: Thank you so much for having me, Deb and Pat. It’s really an honor to be here.
[0:05:08] PM: So, Toby, we’ve had lots of conversations over the years about Fiery. Fiery is a name that almost everybody knows, even if they don’t know they’re using it. Because the Fiery digital front ends, they’ve sort of grown on their own. As Fiery became its own organization, I think the branding and the messaging really started to increase, but for a lot of printers, they don’t always understand the relevance of working with a company like Fiery for their digital front end. Sometimes they think they should roll their own. Printers are creative people, never met a printer who didn’t have a Sovol sitting in the back, pretty sure that they could rebuild their press if they needed to.
So, if there’s a printer out there who thinks that their device’s performance ends at the point where it’s just a print engine, they’re throwing files at it. In fact, if there’s a Fiery sitting on the front end, there are an amazing number of things that a printer can do and can control. What are the most underutilized and most surprising capabilities you get when you work with Fiery instead of some other device that might be sitting there.
[0:06:21] TW: First of all, Pat, let me thank you for the amazing introduction because as you were reading off and Deb was talking about what the digital front end is, I don’t think I could have done a better job myself. I mean, when you think about a digital front end and what it’s doing, you then quickly get into the why it’s doing what it does. I think you hit the key point. It’s the machine, which is a combination often of hardware and software that is taking the designer’s file, usually a PDF, like you said, and then, converting it into the language that the printer, the machine, the marketing machine, really understands. That’s critical, because every machine has a slightly different language.
The machines that come from Canon speak a slightly different language underneath it all than the machines that come from Xerox, or the machines that come from Sharp, or Blanda Corporation, or Epson, or Mutoh, or Konica Minolta, so on and so forth. So, the very first thing that any person who’s using a printing device would notice is the image quality. Getting as close as possible to the conceptual integrity of what the designer intended is going to be the very first thing that they notice. The colors are going to more accurately reflect the colors that the designer intended. The transitions from one color to another color are going to be smooth. The fine lines are going to look great.
Everything about the image is going to be perhaps the first and most important thing that the customer is going to see. Then, usually, is the performance, just how fast the machine can process. A little-known secret in the print industry is that, you buy a printer, often one of the criteria of the printer is how fast the printer is. If it’s a cut sheet printer, it’s pages per minute, if it’s a wide format, it could be feet per second, linear feet per second, or meters per second. The reality is, if you don’t have a fast digital front end, it’s not going to actually produce the files and stream the data and process the data as fast as the printer is able to run. So, you wind up – actually, if you bought a 100-page-per-minute printer, it winds up running at 80 or 85, because you’re waiting for the processing to happen, restraining. Basically, that’s money wasted. Why did you buy a printer that was that speed only to run it a little bit slower?
The same thing, when you get into the resolutions, you get into the color management, you’re basically sacrificing. You’re spending this money on a printer, on the specifications of that printer, and then, you’re not getting the optimal use of it. I’ll talk a little bit about some of these tips and tricks of what people can do because there’s hundreds of features inside.
[0:09:10] PM: That’s what I wanted to ask you a little bit about, Toby, because, I think, one of the things that when I talk to people about Fiery, oftentimes, they don’t realize how many features and functions. I think of them as dials, levers, and knobs that they actually have control of when they’re using a Fiery front end. Sometimes, because their print vendor didn’t tell them, and it’s not that they don’t have access to them, it’s that the print vendor is worried about teaching them about the marking device, and how to work with it, and when to order more consumables. But they’re not always there ready to tell them that, “Oh, by the way, did you know you could run a little bit faster if you change these dials and knobs?” Is there a methodology to learning more about what Fiery can do for you?
[0:09:56] TW: Great question. I think, for our standpoint, we are really the only and certainly the biggest company focused on only digital front ends. It’s what we do. So, I think you raised an important point, which is, the people who are selling the printers, print manufacturers, we call them OEMs, their main business is selling printers, is having a manufacturing line, and making sure customers are getting the best printer that they can. We certainly wish they spent more time with the customers going through the digital front end, because there’s so much capability in there that really are going to make the customers more satisfied, make their print shops more profitable, make their staff less overworked, make their jobs more automated, and get the customers what they want.
Let me start off by saying, first off is, we try as hard as we can inside of the Fiery digital front end to make it as easy as possible to use. Especially with AI these days, there’s a whole bunch of things in the Fiery that kind of let it run in automatic mode, if you will, right, where we are looking inside of a PDF that comes in and automatically setting over 30, I think 40 settings within the Fiery system itself to help it get the best possible output.
The way I like to think of it is a very high-end digital camera. You’ve got 35, 40 settings, and if you start to add all the combinations of this setting like this, you can really get an amazing, amazing, amazing picture. But sometimes, you need to be an expert in order to do that. A lot of people, myself included, when I’m using my digital camera, I just like to hit the auto button, and let all the AI, in this case, like Apple, I use an Apple phone. So, I let all the AI sort of do that and figure out everything for me. Fiery has those settings. I think the first and foremost is to be able to do that.
The second is, if you want to learn, we’ve got – if you really want to get into expert mode and be able to adjust all these things, we’ve got a tremendous amount of training, including certifications, over 30 courses that people take, and they become basically a Fiery-certified expert, which is a great thing for people’s career, by the way. If you’re a Fiery-certified expert, you can walk into any print shop, and people are going to know that you know what you are doing. So, this is for us a key, we have tons of eLearning, there’s tons of YouTube videos, there’s tons of Fiery courses, and a pretty difficult certification to back it up.
[0:12:20] DC: Toby, I was just wondering, as someday who has submitted thousands of files to printers, and only one has ever been perfect. Some of the things that you’re describing seem to me that they would happen in the pre-press process. Making sure the files are correct and optimized. Is Fiery handling that too? Or is it coming into you with that already done, and then, you take over for everything that happens on the press?
[0:12:48] TW: Yeah, it’s a great question. Different shops are going to operate different ways. By the way, I think your one out of a thousand, adding average. It might be slightly lower. I mean, maybe you have some complicated files here, but it’s not too uncommon. I think that people submit it, and it doesn’t quite come out the way they want. So, certain shops are going to have a pre-press, because they’ve got multiple machines and they want to gang up files, and check for fonts, and do things like that. Fiery will certainly work in that mode, and we have a number of great tools in that mode too. But I think a really important point of why Fiery’s approach is different than almost every other approach, is that we understand the insides of the printer extraordinarily well.
Printers are mechanical devices that change based upon the environment that they’re in. They shake, they vibrate, they roll, the paper gets slightly skewed, the temperature is a little bit different. It might be the first print run of the day, it might be the 25th print run of the day, colors drift. What Fiery does is to understand the current real-time running environment of that printer and compensate for exactly what’s happening in that moment to make sure that the prints are going to come out the best they can.
So, pre-press is great, but in order to really get the job to come out perfectly, you need to have a digital front end that’s highly integrated in with the printer. The way that printer is printing the color red after the 9,000th sheet is quite different than the way it does in the first run of the morning. Oh, by the way, depending upon the paper that’s in there, and depending upon all these different combinations of things. So, if pre-press is critical, don’t get me wrong. But without that piece that really directly connects to the printer, you miss out on a lot. That’s often where things go askew.
[SPONSOR MESSAGE]
[0:14:48] DC: Are you looking to elevate your game, take your bottom-line customer relationships, and events to the next level? Then, I want to work with you. I’m Deborah Corn, the Intergalactic Ambassador to the Printerverse. I engage with a vast, global audience of print and marketing professionals across all stages of their careers. They are seeking topical information and resources, new ways to serve their customers and connect with them, optimized processes for their communications and operations, and they need the products and services and partnership you offer to get to their next level.
Print Media Centr offers an array of unique opportunities that amplify your message and support your mission across the Printerverse. Let’s work together, bring the right people together, and move the industry forward together. Link in the show notes. Engage long and prosper.
[EPISODE CONTINUES]
[0:15:49] PM: So, that’s the difference between just being a controller. I’ve been in the industry long enough when I thought that the controller was the end-all-be-all. The digital front end, because it’s really a platform, it’s more than just changing bits and bytes into different bits and bytes. There’s a whole lot more in that environment.
[0:16:11] TW: Right. First, because obviously, getting the image right. I mean, if you don’t, then that’s why, Deb says, “Hey, it didn’t come out the way I wanted.” Then, there’s being able to process it as fast, so you can get the maximum performance. But when you think about it, most print shops these days, jobs are coming in over the web. That’s how –
[0:16:28] PM: Today, yes.
[0:16:28] TW: – everything. So, you need a system that’s going to connect to your web platform. You need a system that’s going to allow you to automate. You’ve got more and more people doing programming now, so some customers want to write their own programs. You might want to offer customized stamps that the customers could submit a picture, and you might want to do some programming to be of this. You need a set of APIs, and a set of documents that people use. You need an automation platform. “Hey, if this type of job comes in, do this, do this, check that.”
So, there’s so much inside of the digital front end that it needs to do to be able to connect the printer to the rest of the print environment inside of that customer shop is paramount. So, it really has become a platform, and you want that platform to be able to work the same way across all of your printers. If you’re going to do JDF to connect to other systems, if you’re going to connect to a management information system, if you’re going to want reporting, if you’re going to want to go over the internet to check the status, you don’t want to have to implement a new system each time you have a new printer. You want it to work exactly the same way.
That’s one of the key values that Fiery provides is, and you alluded to this in the intro. It works with each of the most popular printing platforms that the customer has, and it works across sort of printing domains. You can use in a wide format; you can use it in direct-to-film printing. You can use it in your cut sheet; you can use it even in industrial label production. Sort of know that whenever you do that, it’s going to work with the systems you have, it’s going to produce the colors and images that your customers want.
[0:18:10] PM: One of the things that we noticed was that when inkjet exploded, a lot of the digital front ends weren’t really prepared for the variations across all the inkjet devices. Every printhead, as you mentioned, is different, they have different waveforms. Each one of them behaves the way they want to behave, and the way their engineers wanted them to behave. I would imagine that that’s something that, on your side, meant you had to develop the most logical set of modules to be able to handle all those differences.
[0:18:43] TW: Whenever a print manufacturer, and we work really, really closely with all those print manufacturers. You said we’re sneaky, but we’re not sneaky. They are calling us up, and asking us, and we have deep, deep, deep partnerships. We love our OEM partners. When someone’s making a printer, they have design choices to make. That’s the reality. They have to decide how many colors are going to be in their printer. They need to decide how many bits per pixel, they need to decide on electronics, they need to decide how fast, how much width, all these things. With each of these decisions that they make in their printer, there’s basically limitations.
You’re probably not going to spend – make a printer that has 10 million colors in it, because it would cost too much money, maybe be completely impractical. So, you’re making decisions. With each of those decisions, there’s limits. What Fiery has to do is understand the limits of each of those printers, the machines themselves, and maximize it, so that it looks uniform to the end customer. You’re right, the print heads behave completely different. Electronics behave completely different. Each of these decisions, and speeds, and so on become –
So, at Fiery, we have a lot of work today when we sort of started in our roots, the toner -based systems into inkjet. To be able to really build ultimately what we thought end customers needed when they got to a full digital production.
[0:20:09] DC: Who is actually responsible for managing this? Is it the press operator on each machine? Who needs to program it or make it talk to each other correctly, and how do you support those people, especially when print shops are – sometimes they get a little nervous about having one person who knows the system in a print shop. So, how does it become democratized?
[0:20:35] TW: Great question. So, obviously, it’s going to depend on the customer, and some customers – the owner is extremely hands-on, for example, doing everything themselves. That’ll be the person who is sometimes, the pre-press room, as well as the operator. I heard this a lot during the pandemic where there was a lot of cutbacks on jobs, and they sort of had the owner or the principal sort of step in and wear multiple hats. But in other organizations, you might have the pre-press as we brought up, and the print operator might really just be doing as little as possible, perhaps, loading paper only if there’s multiple machines involved. You can basically have as little work as possible.
What we do is to try to make sure whomever is using the system is set up for success. If they’re the most basic user and just getting started, we’re going to set them up with automatic settings and take it from there. If they’re extremely advanced, then they want to get into the deep, deep, deep world of color science. Some people have PhDs in color science, and they want to play with curves, and adjust formulas, and do that. We let them go that far as well. But for us, it’s a journey with them.
One thing that I see right now happening is people want to get into automation. It’s hot, hot, hot. “Hey, I want to automate.” The thing about automation is everyone wants to do it. No one knows where to start. So, okay, how do you start? What do you do? Do you just hire a whole bunch of service people to come in and spend all your money and get – well, that’s quite a difficult and expensive proposition. So, one of the things we rolled out this year is a real – here’s how to start with automation. It doesn’t need to be this very scary thing. Let’s start with a very basic, maybe you setting up your hot folders or your presets, then you move into templates. Then, you’re combining those two, then you’re moving into more automation. You’re looking at your top jobs and you’re starting to automate how those come in.
Before you know it, over five or six weeks, you’ve got a tremendous amount of automation done, and now you have a really good grasp of what can be done. I think the biggest step is really just starting and asking for help.
[SPONSOR MESSAGE]
[0:22:42] DC: Fiery is the leading provider of digital front ends and workflow solutions for the global digital print and graphic arts industries. Their technology powers everything from business cards to banners, billboards to brochures, textiles to t-shirts. With over two million Fiery servers installed worldwide, they help print businesses grow through productivity, automation, and outstanding results, job after job. Fiery has your back when it comes to solving the challenges of running a print business, whether they’re today’s challenges around workflow, job preparation, and color accuracy, or tomorrow’s challenges that their AI-empowered technologies will help solve. With Fiery, your printers are super-powered, and your life running a print business is that much easier. Fiery, See the Difference. Links in the show notes.
[EPISODE CONTINUES]
[0:23:45] DC: I just have a quick follow-up. When you say that there are automated settings, like there are default settings in there, those are device-specific. So, I picked the press that I have, and those are the settings that come up as default, or are there just default settings, and then, I couldn’t adjust them a little for my press if needed.
[0:24:04] TW: Every device comes with its default settings for that device. For example, we might ship color profiles, default for a device or particular settings based on a device’s capabilities. But in a sort of fully automated mode in Fiery, we’re looking at the job as well when that PDF comes in, because that’s where a lot of these settings come in. So, you’re looking at the PDF and saying, “Aha, I see certain things in this file.” Perhaps it has transparencies, and you say, “Ha, well, okay, let me make sure that I’m rendering those transparencies in the best possible ways.” Maybe you’re seeing fine lines in there, maybe you’re seeing certain fonts, maybe you’re seeing knockout texts, maybe you’re seeing full bleed. You go to files; you’re seeing cut marks. There’s lot of things you can see inside of that file, and say, “Let me change the settings here.”
In the old days, do you want fast or do you want good? Those are long gone. There’s a million settings in between. You want fast when you can get fast, and you want best. But in order to get best, you have to really understand what it is that that artist wanted. The only way to really do that, the only proper place to do that is inside of the digital front end. It speaks PDF, it knows InDesign, and so, it knows Adobe, and it’s able to understand, “Ah, let me explain it in a way this printer is going to produce it the best possible way.”
[0:25:29] PM: Toby, let me take a slight detour because it speaks to something Deb was coming at, which is, if you’ve got all these employees and they’re at different levels of training, you want to basically hand them a solution that’s going to make it as your output as consistent as possible. But if I’m the business owner, I also have some concerns about where I’m spending money on training, pre-press people tend to be expensive.
In the end, I’m looking for a platform that’s going to link all of the requirements of getting consistent print out with my business goals, which is basically keeping my customers happy, also making sure that I’ve got consistency so that I can earn the profit that I’m trying to, and I can grow the way I want to.
It sounds to me that when you spoke about automation, there’s an efficiency component to that too, that when you bring a platform to the print shop where everything is more consistent, everything can be automated at different levels, and then allow for the PhDs to get in there if they want to. That you’re changing the nature of the relationship between the business, the people producing the work, and your ability to get work out the door.
Does that mean that when you have a conversation with your OEM vendors about the Fiery DFE, that it’s a different kind of conversation than somebody just building something that’ll map bits and bytes together?
[0:27:00] TW: Yes, I think there’s a lot to unpack there. I mean, I think you’re hitting on probably one of the most critical parts of print as an industry, and we all love it. It’s a great industry, but the margins can be thin at certain times, or maybe all times. I haven’t met any printer and said, “Boy, am I overflowing in margins?” I mean, it’s competitive.
So, the worst thing for any provider of print is to have that output, whether that’s a reprint or an unsatisfied customer. Both of those just take margins away and [inaudible 0:27:36]. Going back to that print operator, the number one thing they want is, let’s not have that. Let’s make sure that when we produce work, we do it one time, we don’t have reprints, we don’t have customers who are dissatisfied, because that’s going to either be a lost customer or that’s going to be another running of job, a waste of media, all that.
You’re right, when you automate, and you take out that chance for a mistype, or a mis-click, or an error, or someone, unforeseen consequence, you are going to increase your ability to get the job right more often. That’s key. That’s where automation comes in. It’s not only a time savings. Instead of doing 30 clicks, I did one. But it’s not the amount of time that those 30 clicks take. It’s how many errors there might be when you do that.
So, that’s an absolute key thing. Now, when it comes to the OEMs, and the conversations we have with them, I think they understand that. But at the end of the day, the OEMs want to place as many printers as possible. Then, they really want as much work driven to that printer as much as possible. Most of their money and profit comes from either selling clicks or ink.
One of the little-known secrets about Fiery-driven devices compared, let’s say, the non-Fiery driven devices is that they print more. That is to say, Fiery customers tend to print a lot more. Why is that? There’s a plethora of reasons. One is because they’re getting the work right, and they have better color and higher image, they tend to sell more. Number two is, people who know Fiery tend to send more work to those printers than the Fiery’s that don’t have printers. Ultimately, that’s going to be more profit for everybody. That’s going to be more profit for the customer, for the partner, and the OEM themselves. They understand that and that’s a lot of where the discussion comes from.
[0:29:35] PM: Do you think that as we move forward and as you start to see more AI in the DFEs that it’s going to change the nature of how many people it takes to run these printers and run the print shops?
[0:29:49] TW: There’s a big debate here in Silicon Valley about exactly how AI is going to change the landscape of jobs. I can tell you, we use a lot of AI inside of our engineering team. People always say, “Oh, is that going to mean less engineers or more?” Right now, it looks like it’s sort of superpowering people. That is to say, it’s kind of similar to how all of us use AI. You just get a lot more done. So, I don’t necessarily think it’s going to drastically change how many staff are in a shop. Maybe the very large shops will be able to be more productive, but I just see you’re going to get so much more done. That productivity is going to rise to a new level.
One of the really exciting things we’re doing with AI right now is sort of this object-based detection. Imagine you’re a self-driving car, and it’s reading stop signs and it’s reading road signs. Well, making the digital front end more self-driving itself is one of our ambitions. So, we can look at an image I mentioned, and do all these settings. We’re taking it one step further. Imagine looking at an image and saying, “Oh, hey, that’s a football jersey of the San Francisco 49ers. I know the spot colors for that jersey because I’ve recognized that that’s a particular item. I’m going to go look up the spot colors for that and make it happen.” That’s just taking someone an enormous amount of time that someone might do and reduce it to get a much better quality. Or look at a sky, and say, “Aha, the way skies and blues are managed in skies.” The color management is quite different than maybe skin tones or spot colors. So, really getting deep inside of an image using AI, for example, to get much, much, much better color management.
[0:31:36] PM: How much do you think going forward, all the PhDs in color science that I know are like on the edge of retirement. I know there’s a new crop of them coming. I know that we don’t stop producing them. But it seems to me that even for the most high-end shops that there is an opportunity to automate a lot of this color management based on what you were just describing of knowing what a sky is supposed to look like, and knowing what somebody’s spot color is going to be. Do you see the DFE’s becoming even more important as we go forward?
I was talking to someone who said, “Well, you know, I’ve got seven color presses, and I’ve got CYMK presses, and I’ve got some embroidery going on over here that I’d like everything to match.” Is that the role the DFE continues to play going forward?
[0:32:27] TW: I think it started out as completely necessary. The original DFE invention kind of turned a copier into a printer. So, it was necessary to do network print. With what’s happening now, I think it’s going to be even more necessary in the future. There’s really quite a bit of room between, let’s say, that PhD-level color management, and what most print shops are doing. So, if we can raise the tide, if you will, for all the boats, I think it’s going to be really tremendously productive inside of print. Everything’s digitally printed these days, as you know. T-shirts, fabric, every labels, everything we look at. So, in order to continue this analog-to-digital conversion, the key thing is really the digital front end and the printing heads, and the machines themselves. So, in concert with the machine manufacturers, there’s just a lot of innovation coming down that’s going to make people’s lives better.
[SPONSOR MESSAGE]
[0:33:27] DC: Like what you hear? Leave us a comment, click a few stars, share this episode, and please subscribe to the show. Are you interested in being the guest and sharing your information with our active and growing global audience? Podcasts are trending as a potent direct marketing and educational channel for brands and businesses who want to provide portable content for customers and consumers. Visit printmediacentr.com, click on podcasts, and request a partner package today. Share long and prosper.
[EPISODE CONTINUES]
[0:34:00] PM: So, I have to ask you a question we sort of teased as part of the title of this episode and that’s the DIY approach. I’ve been imprinting long enough to or having conversations with companies about writing their own digital front end. They would buy some device from some bespoke manufacturer and they go, “Uh-huh, I think I’ll just write it myself.”
I think, maybe 20 years ago, that was a little bit easier to do. I think the technologies were different. But what would you say to somebody who’s coming to you and saying that they’re trying to make that decision? Should I license Fiery from you guys, or should I just write it myself? Will it just be easier? What are the risks and what do you lose if you go that approach? I’m tipping my hand there that I think it’s a bad approach.
[0:34:48] TW: Well, I think end users at this point are buying something. They might buy a Fiery digital front-end or a premium product, or they might decide to buy something very, very basic that just produces a TIFF, if you will. I think when you have that, it’s a little short-sighted. You have people saying, “Aha, I’m just buying this printer. It’s probably good, out of the box.” Almost in every case, that ends up in dissatisfaction. Someone gets this amazingly digital press, and then, very quickly, “Wait, how do I connect it to this? How do I do that? Why can’t I get one of these?” You’re not getting the advantage of being purely digital. I think people realize that.
The other aspect is press manufacturers themselves. I just came back from the FESPA conference in Berlin, Germany. There’s still an enormous amount of new press manufacturers. A lot of them coming from China for sure. In those printers is sort of, oftentimes, a basic rip, if you will, let’s call it that. Then, customers get it. Then, I said, wait a minute, I’m trying to print a black t-shirt here. Where’s my – how do I put white under it? Why is the other controls not working? Why is the image doesn’t come out? Why these fine lines aren’t working? How come it doesn’t look like the colors I want? So, very quickly, I think they realize, hey, if you’re in business, you want the best tools to make your business great. If the plumber comes to your house, they don’t come with a cheap wrench. They’ve got a great toolbox to make their work quality as, you know, high as possible.
[0:36:21] PM: Let me kind of draw a box around some acronyms we tend to toss around, and again, because our audience tends to skew younger. Let’s make sure everybody understands what you’re saying. You can buy a device that might have some sort of box sitting on the front end that’ll take a PDF in, and it might turn it into a TIFF. And a TIFF is just a raster image of each page with the layers separated, and most of the devices know how to deal with that. But then there is this concept of a raster image processor or RIP. What’s the difference between a Fiery controller and just a rip?
[0:37:01] TW: Thanks, that’s actually a great question. Oftentimes, people call Fiery a RIP, and it sort of drives me crazy.
[0:37:07] PM: A little more than that.
[0:37:08] TW: Yeah, a RIP is exactly right, it’s a raster image processor. It’s basically taking a PDF and it’s converting it into a series of bits that could be understand digitally by a printer. RIPs are provided by a company like Adobe, and it’s one component of a digital front end. It’s an important component for sure. So, if you buy just a RIP, and you’re not buying a full digital front end like a Fiery, you miss out on all the automation. You miss out on all the advanced color management. You miss out on things JDF on layout, and so on, and so forth. There’s a hundred things that you’re sort of missing. It’s like buying a scanner versus a digital camera.
[0:37:56] PM: Okay.
[0:37:57] DC: I think you’ve been very generous with the file creators throughout this podcast, but I want to bring this a little into reality now. We have a lot of what I call civilians creating printing files, and they’re doing it through Canva, and they’re doing it through the online design tools, and they’re certainly doing it through ChatGPT and the image generators. So, the printers are not always dealing with files that were even created by humans in some cases. So, I would almost say that if you – I’m hoping that your system is accounting for this or can account for it. But it seems to me, there is a gigantic value proposition of using something that can discern what it’s looking at versus a person having to go through all of that, and figure out if it can be printed at all.
[0:38:48] TW: Yes, thanks. That’s a great point. You’re right. I’ve kind of been referring to the designer almost as a person through this whole thing, but you’re raising a really good point.
[0:38:55] DC: Well, they are people, but they don’t always set up files correctly because they’re creative.
[0:39:01] TW: This is the bane of every single print shop. If only the people who gave me the files had done this, my job would be so much easier. That’s 100% the case, whether the files printed or created in Canva, or by ChatGPT. It’s often not created with a printer in mind. Then, when someone wants it, “Oh, could you make this a book cover or could you turn this into business cards? Could you make it bigger? Can you make it smaller?” Being able to do that well is incredibly important.
In the old days, when you have someone went into a print shop, say, “I have this image, I pulled it off the internet. Can you make it bigger?” You had image scaling algorithms. All of those, for example, all of our image scaling algorithms have sort of been redone in the last few years, all using AI. It’s one thing to look at an image and say, “I see these two pixels next to each other. Let me smooth out the colors.” It’s another thing to look at the image and say, “I think that’s supposed to be a tree. Therefore, let me make a tree using all of the data that I have to make it look as much as possible as the original image. That’s going to make a much better upscaling of an image, knowing, “Hey, this is what it’s really supposed to be.”
You’re right, and that’s where all of this is going, is really more AI, more decisions by the DFE because the person or creatives are the thing that created the image. It didn’t have print in mind, didn’t know the color separations, didn’t know the capabilities of the printer itself.
[0:40:29] PM: So, do you think, Toby, going forward that we’re going to see DFEs just continue to become almost, I won’t say more important than the marking engine, but do you think we’re going to see them more networked so that a single digital front end is driving multiple disparate types of devices and provide almost a Central Star Trek Enterprise console for the entire print shop? Because I’ve heard print shop managers say that that’s what they would like. I don’t know if they’re prepared for how that changes their business, but it sounds like something that I hear asked for.
[0:41:06] TW: I think you have different situations. What people want, generally speaking, is to be able to manage things centrally, let jobs come in to one place, let as much processing as you can do, so that you have consistency through your organization. And you’ve got the right metrics and analytics, all coming kind of from one to place. With that said, every printer operates a printing machine. In this case, it operates a little bit differently. So, you really do need to have technology next to the printer to be able to do those compensations related to the exact, you state of that machine. There’s also a tremendous amount of data.
We talked about performance. I don’t get into the math of it, but if you start to do math, I know math doesn’t work well on podcasts. But if you start to get into a color, it’s four bits per pixel, and there’s four colors on a CMYK press, and 1200 dots per inch, and you do all that math out on a very simple 100-page-per-minute printer. You’re pumping pixels at a rate that’s maybe 30 or 40 times what Netflix does. So, most companies don’t want to have a Netflix-sized data center inside of their print. The way to do that is to use some very, very intelligent – we make our own ASIC in Fiery, and keeping that chip as close as possible to the printer really enables the high performance. So, it’s a combination of both.
[0:42:32] JM: I think that going forward, it sounds like we’ve got a really great basis for our overall podcast series. I think Toby’s done an amazing job of laying the groundwork for some of the different conversations we’re going to have over this four-episode set. I’m just really excited, and I hope everybody will listen to the rest of the podcast as well.
[0:42:57] DC: Yes, the next one we’re going to do is, why isn’t my color automated? Then, we’re going to discuss how to drive industrial print with DFE power. Then, we’re going to wrap it up with the direct-to-film revolution, which I’ve been seeing everywhere at sign shows, at white format shows, even at DSCOOP. Everybody’s with the film now. So, that is going to be super important.
Everything that you need to connect with Fiery and learn about what we’ve spoken about today will be in the show notes. Toby, thank you so much for your time and for helping everybody in the industry move faster and better for more profit margins. I agree with you. I don’t ever come across a printer running around screaming, “My margins are awesome, everybody.” So, that is super important, that we make sure that the printers are set up for success. Pat, any final words?
[0:43:58] PM: I just want to thank Toby for making things clear. It’s a big industry. We serve a lot of different segments, a lot of different technologies. It’s nice to know that there are guardians of the galaxy who are keeping an eye on what’s required to keep all of these devices operating optimally.
[0:44:21] DC: Toby, final words?
[0:44:23] TW: I would just like to thank you so much, Deb and Pat, it’s always a blast to be here and talking about digital front ends. We’re so passionate about things, and what our customers are doing, and what they’re demanding of us, and what they’re demanding of our partners. There’s so much innovation ahead. I’m looking forward to keep helping to drive digital front end innovation in the industry.
[0:44:42] DC: Thanks, everyone for your time and attention. Until next time, Fiery long and prosper.
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[0:44:50] DC: Thanks for listening to Podcasts From the Printerverse. Please subscribe, click some stars, and leave us a review. Connect with us through printmediacentr.com. We’d love to hear your feedback on our shows and topics that are of interest for future broadcasts. Until next time, thanks for joining us. Print long and prosper.
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