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Newsletter of TheMagicTouch April 2013 Welcome to! And as if by Magic - your next edition of Abracadbra appears! It’s been a busy few months for us all at TheMagicTouch - as you are aware exhibitions are tightly packed into the first quarter of the year. These include; Trophex, Trade Only, Printwear and Promotion, Focus on Imaging, Sign UK, Corporate Workwear Show as well as helping out at The Gadget Show and Retail Business Technology. Phew! This time round we’d like to give you an insight into some interesting new products we now have available plus give you an overview of the Printwear and Promotion show - for those of you that couldn’t make it. for the memories! Printing on wood is nothing new for many of our customers good old CPM paper through your printer or copier and press to the wood. Sourcing the right kind of wood is always the trickiest part. It needs to be nice and smooth, pale in colour (so your images display nicely) and can take a little experimentation to get the right times and temperatures (as the pieces vary in thickness). Enter PLANX! A fantastic new range of printable wooden products with a wide variety of applications. Made from 12mm solid Fir wood and white washed with a vintage finish, the PLANX range are great for bars, hotels, home decoration and any number of other applications! There is a variety of cut shapes to suit your customers needs - including circular clocks, rectangular sign boards, helpful direction arrows, picture frames and a number of shaped door signs. Production is simple and the finished effect is outstanding. PLANX are a simple, profitable product that look great and have an undeniable cool factor! We have some great feedback from customers we’d like to share with you too and a look at image resolution vs printing DPI in the Top Tips section. As well as all of that we have a couple of new faces to introduce! Lots to read - we hope you enjoy. Best Regards Jim Nicol Managing Director Show and tell! Well, as mentioned in the introduction it’s been a busy year of shows so far - and none busier than the Printwear and Promotion show at the NEC Birmingham back in February. For those of you that we didn’t have the pleasure of meeting - below is a summary on this year’s show from our point of view. Attending exhibitions is always a great opportunity for catching up with our existing customers, meeting new ones and answering a myriad of questions on how to go about getting started. The days pass in a flash and we hopefully inform and answer many specific questions and requests - leaving many happy customers in our wake. considered a nightmare to decorate using traditional print methods. This opportunity was not ignored by customers as the demand for the new printer was beyond all expectations. With so many possibilities for this printer it’s difficult to show everything it can do at a show - if you didn’t get the chance to see what you wanted at this years show (or couldn’t make it), drop us a line. Maybe we can arrange for you to visit us here or update you on our planned Summer Regional Roadshows. There’s always FESPA 25-29 June! Without doubt the main thing visitors wanted to see was... the OKI 711WT, or “the white toner printer”. At Printwear and Promotion we demonstrated with two printers alongside two presses to highlight the simplicity and quality using WoW 7.5 - a new version of WoW specifically made with the 711WT in mind and negating the need to produce a mask (as in the WoW 7.2 version). The ability to print using white toner opens the door to so many unique applications which previously had been Award Winner Just a special mention to congratulate Stitch & Print of Wigton, Cumbria on their fantastic shirt design winning the ‘Best Transfer Print’ category at Printwear and Promotion 2013. Printed with WoW 7.5 using the TMT/OKI 711WT printer - it’s always nice to see customers producing great designs making the most of the technology we offer! Congratulations guys! TMT hit the Big Screen At TMT we try to move in all the right circles and markets and pride ourselves on some of the more diverse trades we work with from bespoke fashion shoe and bag producers to home operators trading online. This month it was our great pleasure to install the OKI 711WT at the BTC group - home to an award winning Screen Print division and who decorate more than 1 million promotional textiles a year at their headquarters in Hayes, Middlesex. “At BTC Group we have the most advanced print machinery available. Incorporating 14 and 8 colour automatics. Every day we demonstrate our ability to understand a brief and deliver the very best product you will find. Having been in the industry for over 30 years I have never seen anything like the results from WoW 7.5 - let alone transfer prints onto dark fabric. It is by far the best in-house transfer system I have used. “ Chris Davies - Print Manager An area of confusion I see a lot stems from the difference between DPI and PPI. The main problem is that DPI (dots per inch) is an old term that has been incorrectly applied to resolution and the size of a digital image when PPI (pixels per inch) is really what is meant. DPI is still used wrongly in some documents and software still. Lets look at the difference and why it matters... PPI - PIXELS PER INCH PPI is the number of pixels per inch in your image. It affects the print size and output quality of your image. Low PPI means pixels will be very large and you’ll see jagged edges (you will see individual pixels). Acceptable PPI for a print-out depends on the size of the print. All PPI does is affect the print size of the image. You can change the print size, by re-sampling or by not re-sampling. Not re-sampling is usually better, this will only change the size of the print. Using re-sampling will change the number of pixels in order to match the print size. So if you don’t resample, changing the PPI setting will increase or decrease the print size (but does not affect the number of pixels present). With re-sampling, if you change the PPI, you will gain or loose pixels (lowering PPI looses pixels, increasing PPI creates pixels. Creating pixels is a bad idea, they get generated by the computer and the results aren’t usually good. It’s a good idea to keep the original file if re-sampling. Suppose it’s set at 100 PPI (producing the same 1” x 1” printed image above). If re-sampling, the dimensions won’t change - if you change the PPI to 10 you would keep a 1” x 1” image and the computer would throw out pixels to keep the size. You’d end up with a 10 x 10 pixel image in the end. If you went the other way, and changed the PPI to 300, then the computer would generate pixels to make a 300 x 300 pixel image that’s still 1” x 1” when printed - but those new pixels with just be copies of the ones already present. DPI - DOTS PER INCH DPI only refers to the printer. Every pixel output is made of coloured toner. Because of the small number of colours, the printer needs to mix these toners to make up all the colours of the image. So each pixel is created by a series of tiny dots. So a 1200 DPI printer uses 1200 dots of toner in every inch to make up the colours. If you were printing a 300 PPI image, then every pixel would be made up of 16 smaller dots (1200 DPI x 1200 DPI / 300 PPI x 300 PPI). A low DPI would have fewer dots making up each pixel. A high DPI would have more dots for each pixel. So there you go - printing a low PPI image at a high DPI will have no beneficial effect on your image, you’ll just use more toner to display the existing number of pixels. Re-sampling the image upwards will just clone more of the existing pixels (usually leading to a blocky and fuzzy image). Unfortunately there’s no getting away from the fact that good quality original image will be needed for a good quality print. New Kids on the Block New Regional Support Managers are like buses all of a sudden two come along at once! Some of you will have already met them (see page 2 about this years shows!) or will have perhaps bumped into them in their previous roles. Whatever the situation we are extremely happy to welcome aboard two such experienced and knowledgeable team members. Both have a variety of experience with different print systems, both help us increase our support and sales coverage within the UK - both are easy to deal with. Here’s just a little bit about them... ADAM WYLES Based in Wales and covering South Wales and the South West of England, Adam comes from a long line of pirates. Aided by his faithful parrot ‘Buttercup’ he is particularly experienced in large format printing - and setting rigging. Yarrr. MARK ROSSI Covering Northern England and the Midlands, Mark is cousin and mentor of Status Quo guitarist Francis Rossi - just ask him to show you his mean riffs. Since his retirement from Moto GP Mark has become a specialist in transfer media. TheMagicTouch (GB) Ltd Unit 4 • Apex Business Centre • Boscombe Rd • Dunstable • Bedfordshire • LU5 4SB • England telephone: +44 (0)1582 671444 www.themagictouch.co.uk email: sales@themagictouch.co.uk TheMagicTouch and MagiCut are registered trade marks of TheMagicTouch Gmbh, Germany. PPI and DPI Pretend you have a 100 x 100 pixel image. Without re-sampling if you set the image to print at 10 PPI, then you’d have a 10” x 10” image. If you set the image to print at 100 PPI, you’d have a 1” x 1” image. Adjusting the value doesn’t effect the number of pixels in the image at all, it just changes the print size.