Attracting Interest: The State Of Fod - finishing-on-demand
American Printer

AS ON-DEMAND FINISHING BECOMES AN ESTABLISHED PART OF POSTPRESS OPERATIONS, DIGITAL LANGUAGE STANDARDS, HEAVY-IRON PLAYERS AND MORE EMERGE INTO THE ARENA

The last time we looked at the finishing end of the print-on-demand (POD) market, it was just after Drupa 2000. The blockbuster print show in Dusseldorf, Germany, featured digital print systems from Heidelberg, Xerox, Oce, Xeikon, Karat Digital Press, Scitex Digital Printing and many more. (See "Demanding FOD," July 2000, p. 30.)

Almost all of the POD vendors featured options for turning all that paper into booklets, books and a host of other possibilities. The operative theory was to couple digital printing and finishing into a modular unit capable of adding significant value to the process. On-demand systems should be flexible enough to turn out a variety of completed products, and enable the digital printer to offer an acceptable variety and quality of finished work to the user.

The recent Xplor Exhibition in Miami Beach, FL, gave us a chance to revisit finishing-on-demand (FOD) systems to see what, if anything, had changed or was new. Xplor started out more than a decade ago as a Xerox high-volume document printer users group. Over the years, it has morphed into a full-fledged conference and exhibition for volume digital document processors. These include banks, insurance companies, credit card statement processors and mailers. Increasingly, though, on-demand printers as well as traditional shops walk the exhibit halls in search of the next big digital thing that could be added to their manufacturing mix.

NEW ROLES FOR POD