If publication gravure printing didn't exist, would it be necessary to invent it? Discuss.
This question popped into my head during the annual European Rotogravure Association (ERA) conference last week. I must emphasise that I am referring to gravure printing for magazines and catalogue-type products, as opposed to packaging gravure which is a different beast altogether.
Just the other day Polestar chief Barry Hibbert told me that his gravure facilities are chock-a-block until next February, so perhaps it's specious to even ask this question. However, it seems to me that publication gravure printers can perhaps be likened to the repro houses of old. Demand for their product is changing and diminishing. Newspaper circulations are in decline, so fewer supplements are required. Magazines are still abundant but paginations and circulations are in the main down too. And while a handful of the so-called 'big book' catalogues involving millions of copies of the same doorstop do still exist, elsewhere the catalogue sales model is shifting to a more versioned approach involving smaller catalogues and magalogue/catazine products that are produced more frequently. The pre-press side of gravure remains laborious and slow, and the process overall can hardly be said to be a poster boy for the environment movement because of all the nasty chemicals required. In that respect it can perhaps be likened to a potato, in that if you tried to introduce it onto the market now the EU wouldn't let you.
At the ERA bash one of the speakers poo-pood the so-called threat to the process from digital printing, but I think he was missing the point. The competition for gravure surely comes from today's high-speed, high-pagination web offset presses, including the new 96pp variant that's just coming on to the market. Its positive advantage against web is of course in superior handling of lightweight papers and far greater flexibility of page formats and paginations, which are important pluses especially now. But still, I can't help feeling that publication gravure is a bit of dinosaur and when it comes to print's evolution it's in a dead-end.
