Notes from the DSCOOP Conference

Last week the DSCOOP conference was held in San Diego and it was the largest gathering of HP-Indigo digital press owners ever. Around 1200 people attended this year's conference an increase of over 60% from the 2007 conference.

Apart from the golf day, the highlights of the conference for me were:

1. Several ideas were presented around color consistency of the HP-Indigo presses. With the WS4500 press color consistency is already excellent but some tips were presented to make it even better.
2. There was a fascinating update on laser die-cutting from AB Graphic. Some of the research going on at that company should see laser cutting finally reach it's potential in the next year or so.
3. The introduction of "3D" color bar codes from HP was also fascinating. These are like 2D barcodes except with 256 colors. With a standard digital press you can encode up to 96 characters, easily enough for every product item on the shelf to have a unique code.
4. The HP senior management introduced Print 2.0, their vision for the future of print. This involves providing the tools so that more print jobs are printed on digital printers and presses as opposed to the traditional analog devices.
5. HP's commitment to being a leader in environmental stewardship. The HP-Indigo division is actually a leader within HP for eco-centric innovation (there will be more on this in a future post).

You can get a more complete rundown of the conference on the official DSCOOP Conference blog.