Like a lot of you, I spent a good amount of time at Fespa 2013. Being a regular to Sign UK, I was interested to see what all the hype was about and seeing that it was coming to a city near me, this was my chance.
My initial thoughts were that it was Sign UK as it used to be, ten years or so ago. Back then all of the main material and hardware suppliers booked a large stand space and battled it out with each other to do some business and to promote their wares, whereas now they take it in turns every few years when they think they might be missing out on something. Everybody was trying to launch the best thing since sliced bread and there were some great, never to be repeated (but probably still available) show offers to be had. This helped to create a great buzz and made you want to visit all corners of the two halls to make sure you hadn’t missed a thing.
After two days that was me done and I trudged back to my subterranean existence to ponder it all. On reflection, I loved seeing all the copy products on show, all looking a bit more Heath Robinson in their build quality, making lots of noise and usually being demo’d by somebody straight out of the R&D dept. The funniest thing? I couldn’t quite work out which of the stands where staff were wearing white coats and holding clipboards were either a marketing gimmick or actually real engineers trying to keep the machines running!
With some of the machines on display looking a little bit unfinished at times, my grandad’s old saying “buy cheap, buy twice” popped into my head a few times as I walked around. Then there was the new ‘industrial’ latex printer which seemed to generate enough heat to keep a large school warmed throughout winter but all you heard from staff on the stand was how environmentally friendly it and the ink was. Seems to be a confused message to me...
Not wanting to sound totally negative, the consistency of print equipment has definitely moved to another level over the past 12 months. No longer is poor print quality acceptable, HD is the norm even at industrial print speeds. My main thought though is that you pay for the speed increase through the cost of this new kit which invariably just has more printheads and more moving parts waiting to breakdown, so unless you already have a need for this additional capacity is it worth rushing to re-invest just to keep up with the Jones’s?