Digital technology has come to the printing industry, not just digital printing, but virtually all prepress, printing and postpress production processes integrated into digital Workflow.
There are many examples of how print production is improving on a completely new basis.
The global fleet of scanners has increased. There are now many models already available that can meet any customer requirement. But at the same time, there has been a fantastic growth in both quantity and quality of the intensively developing digital cameras, which also solve many printing production tasks at the highest level.
But what about “displacement”? It must be said that, despite the absence of any flaunting of their infallibility and competitiveness, there are certain processes going on in this direction, by which the reader can judge for himself whether there is any displacement of the scanner by the digital camera or, on the contrary, their positive aspects are combined for the purpose of further optimization of production processes.
In the printing industry, including newspaper production, a number of new technologies using scanners have emerged that force a new look at the work of the photojournalist working in newspaper and magazine production. What are these technologies?
Here are some examples
Abroad, more and more newspapers are changing their methods of managing illustration information throughout the entire stage of newspaper creation by using purposeful end-to-end Workflow production process management systems in the publishing house and print shop.
For a relatively long time (about 15 years), major foreign newspaper publishers have been using black-and-white scanner technology. It consists of the following. All the films that come into production are scanned in a complete set. The desired photos are selected on the computer monitor, and all the others are erased from its memory. Now this technology, thanks to the emergence of new, affordable and acceptable quality photos, as well as the appropriate software scanners, is used even in small newspapers.
The way the technology worked was this. Outside editorial offices of newspapers that had long been using NIS, photojournalists would send photos on paper to the central editorial office. There, the photos were taken to the scanning department, where they were read by a high-resolution black-and-white scanner. The images were processed at high speed (up to 80 scans per hour) using the appropriate software: their sharpness and gradation characteristics were corrected, the desired scale was set, cropping and rastering were done. This was the fastest method of obtaining a screened paper image for adhesive mounting.
However, the increasing decentralization of newspaper production, the lowering of the price of scanners and the expansion of their range, the appearance and improvement of digital cameras and their use in production processes, digital data transmission methods and the possibilities of integrating text and illustrations, including in color, have radically changed the technological process of creating newspaper pages. Outside editorial offices began to make extensive use of reflective and transmitted light scanners. Direct film scanners and digital cameras have made it possible to do without photographic paper. This saves time and materials and avoids loss of quality. Some editors prefer to use transparencies for scanning. However, the creation of a number of negative scanners that are easy to use, have high productivity (Kodak, Polaroid, Nikon), and provide high image quality, has allowed many editorial offices to opt for negative technology, eliminating the production of prints.
The further development of technology made it a priority to create a technology that would eliminate the flow of paper prints from production altogether. This is provided by digital technology using digital cameras and the evaluation of photo prints on a computer monitor screen. A paper printout can be made for an editorial conference, and multiple versions of the photos can be shown on it. Some major newspaper printers have in the last few years switched to negative high throughput scanners (like the Kodak PIW, originally created for making photo CDs). These scanners can scan up to 300 high quality images in an hour. And this transition turned out to be exceptionally rational for them.
The technology here goes like this: the editor sends the film by pneumatic mail to the central darkroom, where it is developed and scanned. In half an hour the editor and the photographer can evaluate the photo on the monitor. With this technology, up to 95% of the images are usually erased after selection. The processing of images in the Workflow, as well as their subsequent archiving, is done with the help of specially created software. Many medium and small newspapers hold the belief that automatic scanning is an expensive process. And this is true, because the cost of automatic scanners reaches $50,000 or more. An inexpensive alternative is the Konica (RX-1) or Sony (UY-S77) scanners, whose scanning speed is up to 9 seconds per frame and whose data recording into computer memory is 16 seconds. The price for them is $6-7 thousand. The offered FotoStation software can determine any resolution of photos and calculates data for it.
For newsrooms that do not work entirely on digital technology, there is an alternative: the entire film is pre-scanned for a few seconds on a Sony scanner and the images are displayed on the monitor. Suitable frames are selected and then scanned for further processing.
There is also another option: a pre-scan is performed at each workstation with the FotoStation and the resulting images are marked; the operator then scans the marked frames at the desired resolution. Editorial offices working in a decentralized way scan themselves in order to shorten the image path from the photographer to the editor. Thus, a small local newsroom can have a scanner in-house. All of these methods lead to the abandonment of the newspaper’s reproduction department, and in its place, a pictorial information department with digital cameras and scanners is created. The photographer there is not the supplier of raw material, but the editor’s partner in selecting appropriate subjects. He is also responsible for the quality of the print. Thus, scanning negatives is a cost-effective solution for the newspaper, especially for reading large volumes of information, an investment that quickly pays for itself.
The electronic formation of newspaper pages is made up of various blocks of editorial, advertising and illustration information. Until very recently, drum scanners were superior to flatbed scanners in this process, both technically and qualitatively. For they, giving an optical resolution of over 10,000 dpi, 48-bit color depth and high optical density (over 4.0 D), left far behind flatbed models that provide a physical resolution of no more than 1200 dpi. This led to the need to interpolate missing illustration information, which significantly reduced the quality of photographs. The advantages of flatbed scanners are their relatively low cost (no more than $1,500 for mid-range devices) as well as their ease of use. For example, their maintenance does not require a qualified operator. But here an important role is played by the quality of components, which can be different.
In general, the quality of scanning is determined by means of special test tables. High-performance scanner software can partially or completely eliminate all the shortcomings of a scanner.
With such programs, you can adjust the optical density interval, contrast, and color saturation in detail. When scanning, the selection of an appropriate color space is also important, and further image processing requires the selection of a scan-supported data format. An increasingly important issue for flatbed scanners is the optimal use of color management. Thus, flatbed scanners are not as effective as drum scanners when the imaging material is problematic, the magnification is large and reproduction quality must be particularly high. For conventional publications, on the other hand, they are quite acceptable, having a good productivity/price ratio, relatively easy maintenance and better integration into the production Workflow.
Large newspapers are always faced with the challenge of getting information, illustrations and ads out quickly from their external newsrooms and processing them further. The new Workflow organization now provides a way for external newsrooms to scan finished pages and deliver them to the central newsroom. In order to bring this information closer to the reader, publishers are restructuring their prepress processes, primarily by introducing digital Workflow and the latest digital prepress technology. Scanners play a major role in the modernization of the newspaper production process, and they have become widely used by editorial offices in their decentralized newspaper preparation process. As a rule, scanners of A3+ newspaper format are used. An example of such a scanner is the EskoScan 1318 from Purup-Eskofot, which offers high productivity and good page quality. In one of the external editorial offices of the German newspaper publisher Sdwest Presse, three such scanners enable the production of 50 to 150 advertising pages per week, with an average ink factor of 1.5. A variety of originals and scanning methods are used here. In the first place among the scanning methods is the CopyDot technology which digitizes mainly screened originals of transmitted light and film.
Thus, the scanned full strips are sent to the central editorial office for intermediate storage. For each of the stories, the server there generates preview data arrays which are used to layout the strips. The scanners are integrated into the production network. This technology makes it possible to obtain complete newspaper strips from external locations, which are corrected, supplemented and output on film or paper. The EskoScan 1318, unlike many other A3 flatbed scanners, is served by its own workstation, which operates the JPS (Job Preparation Station). The originals are mounted on a carrier base and placed on the digitizing board with the help of a pin alignment. The JPS software determines the scanning parameters, and the operator puts the mounted original into the scanner, where the scanning is performed. The scanner has three operating modes: normal, high-speed, and high-quality. The high-speed mode with a resolution of 1270 dpi is especially popular with newspapers. It takes about 7 minutes to scan one black and white ad. The return on investment of the scanner is very fast, mainly due to the reduction in shipping and courier costs.
Of course, the best results are obtained by using a scanner and a digital camera. Digital cameras make it easier to select and process illustrations. The use of digital technology enhances the quality and cost-effectiveness of the preparation and production of newspaper, magazine, excerpts, and other publications.
