Last week I was at this year's IFRA newspaper exhibition in Vienna, Austria. Whilst attendance may have been down on previous years, the Kodak booth was well visited by customers and our dealers.

At the show, we proudly launched our new VioletNews Gold plate for newspapers, which along with its developer system offers customers greatly reduced chemical usage, reduced waste, and associated costs - a hot topic with today's newspaper printers. The new developer system reduces replenishment and antioxidation dosing rates and allows higher developer capacity and cleanliness. This product is now fully available, and is a significant improvement over the established VioletNews product.

We also took the opportunity at IFRA to show a technology demonstration of a new thermal newspaper plate being developed that will reduce processing and equipment complexity with improved features and customer benefits.

These technologies are only the start of our future offset plate development path. Reducing complexity whilst maintaining or improving product performance across different customer requirements and conditions is a continuing goal.

Reducing the different stages of processing, as with the "Simple Process" plates being offered in today's market, or full elimination of processing steps, as with Kodak Thermal Direct (Commercial) and PF-N (Newspaper) Non Process plates, will not yet suit every customer or condition. Kodak is developing new products that will meet the various needs of the diverse newspaper printing industry. Certain market segments still need the performance and robustness only delivered today by preheat and/or prewash technologies.

However, our technology demonstration at IFRA showed a thermal no preheat, no prewash newspaper plate system, presently in early selected customer testing, that is aimed to deliver very high press robustness and chemical resistance with a shorter processing footprint and low chemical consumption. The customer should be able to use their existing processor, switching off the preheat and prewash sections, saving energy, water, and waste.

Customers I met with on the stand made it clear that in today's market newspaper printers are being challenged to improve costs, reduce waste, and be environmentally responsible, but they still need to maintain productivity, quality and deadlines.

These customers were keen to tell me that products must meet both today's and future demands, and in particular manufacturers must pay attention to the environmental aspects. Also, customers expect performance in prepress, on press and with the printed copy to be maintained if not improved.

Customer response to our product approach was very positive, confirming that reducing chemical usage, waste and associated costs was a large growing requirement in their business. Customers also confirmed that the need to maintain product performance was key, and our new VioletNews Gold plate and technology demonstration both were on target.