Re: filmscanners: Repro house skirmishing (long)

[Arthur Entlich <artistic@ampsc.com>]

Tony,

I, luckily, in more recent years, have had less and less dealings with 
commercial printers.  When I was president of Alpine Graphics (a US 
poster company) in the mid seventies, we had two printers, one in 
Boulder, Colorado, where the company was located, and one in Milwaukee 
Wisconsin (beer land) where our main printing was accomplished.  The 
company we used was the same company that printed the fold out for 
Playboy (and only the fold-out, BTW).  We used them because they had, at 
that time, the largest offset 4 color press in the US, and we were 
producing some posters, like "Top of Switzerland" which was something 
like 7 feet long. These posters were ganged and every messed up sheet 
was an expensive piece of garbage...

I used to fly in for the poster runs to oversee the process.  It never 
failed that something needed to be fixed, while impatient pressmen 
tapped their feet at me.  It was a bit like standing in front of a train 
that had its engine revved to full RPM, and only the brakes holding it.
One time, we had to pull and remake one color plate due to defects... 
you can imagine.

Anyway, I learned two things from my experience back then.  One, leave 
nothing to chance, opinion, or guesswork, and two, never show fear ;-)

Printers make their money on volume.  The quicker they can complete a 
job and get the next set of plates on and running, the more bucks in 
their pockets. If any ambiguity exists, they will blame you, even though 
they are supposed to be the experts in managing color translation.

So... I now never leave anything up to the printers.  If they get a 
digital file, they also get a proof.  It is explained in no uncertain 
terms that the result is supposed to look like the proof regardless of 
what the digital file looks like on their monitors, and I tell them that 
the proof came off of the file, so I know it can be done.

This is the beauty of Epson's printers.  Although I know of cases where 
separations were done directly from Epson prints, and with some of their 
newer printers, this is not an unreasonable approach, the main point of 
the Epson printout is that it is a proof of the potential of the file. 
If the darn repro house cannot reproduce something approaching a file 
output from a 100 pound sterling ($200) printer, they have a lot of 
explaining to do.  I'd go as far as putting a "PROOF" watermark on the 
print, so they don't scan it, unless they are so lame with digital files 
that they might be better off doing just that.

In one case I experienced, we were having our color catalogue printed. 
The local Boulder Colo. printer only had a 2 color press that was large 
enough for the sheets (the same sheets were also used in POP displays), 
and they were 2 blocks from our offices, so we went with them.

I had designed and set the catalogue and knew our products pretty well. 
They printed the cyan and yellow plates first, and as soon as they come 
off the press, I told them they looked wrong... way too much of both 
colors.  The background color was a nice fleshy beige color, and this 
muddy mustard green was obviously wrong.  The press master told me I was 
wrong and it was because the magenta wasn't there yet.  I disagreed, and 
showed him the chroma separations, but he insisted I just sit back and 
I'd see when the second print run added the magenta and black.

Well, I made my protest to our rep in the front office, but he said the 
"guys" know what they were doing.  Late that evening, the second run 
commenced, and it was just god awful color.  The pressman was now trying 
to convince me it was "pretty close" (maybe for someone color-blind!)

Well, we were on a deadline, in fact past it already, and the damage was 
done, so they printed the whole run, and we had to send the catalogues 
out that way, because we had run out of time and they were for 
September, our busiest time due to university bookstore sales.

However, there was no way we were going to use those for our POP 
displays, so we had all of them made into catalogues.

Anyway, to make a long story a bit shorter, once things calmed down, I 
had a 'tete a tete' with our rep, and he finally admitted to me that 
their regular pressman had injured himself while installing our plates 
and was sent home, and the guy that ran out run was a sub.

Needless to say, we ended up with the full run being redone properly, 
and we only paid some trucking costs.  We also never used that printer 
again.

Art

Tony Sleep wrote:

> OK, here's a legitimate target for spite and bile, and it's decidedly ON 
>topic. 
> I have said some very bad words in their direction already, as I just don't 
> know what to do about this.
>