was a impressive tradeshow, with lots of people from the printing industry. Showing machines is one part. One can get a good idea of what is actual in printing effects, costs and handling, at least if some experience already exists. What wondered me was, that at such a show, where much money is put into booths, still occure obvious lapse with very simple things.
So at the Epson booth, which was fairly large, opalescence or broncing in the proofs was rather the standard, even for the Oris RIP. I had expected they sorted such things out and present the optimum of the K3 devices. But possibly the connection of selling machinery and software in one part is more of an objective in a customer relation. So customers see what they get after buying. This helps decreasing support requests, while increasing satisfaction.
Minolta showed a very nice, and large, laser copier/printer. The colours seemed constant, which is a major concern in using this technology for proofs. Just the selected image was squeezed through a assumedly 8 bit rendering path or a terrible profile. One could easily see in the presented gradients. It’s hard to recommend such a expensive device, if one does not know how it can be done better from the software side.

What was really missed was a open source booth. ArgyllCMS/LProf could be shown for calibration and profiling. There is Ghostscript for rendering PDF’s, CUPS for spooling, littleCMS for colour conversions and Gutenprint for driving ink jets. I would offer to demonstrate live my CinePaint proofing tutorial. This would be the right audience.
To center around Linux/BSD seems not that much of a break there, with some companies running Linux since years as servers for their workflows. At least Samba would be a good add to the open source list above.
Well, whether it is possible to sort out broncing and provide a better rendering path with pure open source components, would be a good toppic at the open source booth.