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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: [email protected]
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.