Gateway to library of over 250 helpful reports by Nicholas Hellmuth and FLAAR staff on wide format inkjet printers, inkjet media, RIPs. We cover the entire workflow: from scanning through to finishing (cutting, coating, laminating).
FLAAR Reports to provide expanded services to ISA sign expo 2012
Last year FLAAR provided an innovative floor-plan map, based on printers, cutters, inks and media. We copyrighted this jointly with ISA (we had to smile when we saw that FESPA had a similar map this year (with no citation to the idea source), after FLAAR Reports produced one independently for attendees to FESPA last year).
Our goal is to work together with all wide-format printer and photography and 3D imaging expo organizers to improve benefits for exhibitors and attendees.
FLAAR will also send a video photographer to ISA with an 18 megapixel HDSLR video camera and the latest Manfrotto video head atop a pro-level Gitzo tripod.
This web site provides the table of contents of the complete corpus of the FLAAR Report-Series, including new titles for 2010. 2011, and what will appear during 2012.
After readers got the free reports from the inquiry-survey form they kept asking how they could order all the rest. They did not want to be restricted to the limit of three to five titles; readers said they wanted entire sets and would rather pay for them. So we have dedicated several months to preparing the new system you see on this ...dot.NET web site.
Over one million people a year read all the sites in the FLAAR network (there are individual sites with over a million hits in a single month from over 20,000 individual readers, per month; another 20,000+ the next month). But the valid count is visitors, not hits. Our site on UV and solvent printers was read by more than 411,000 people around the world during 2009. The FLAAR site on digital-photography is read by over 340,000 people a year, and more on other FLAAR sites (on water-based printers).
The FLAAR information network consists of about six web sites with over 900 pages of informative content. We have information in three languages read in over 62 countries worldwide.
This list of available FLAAR Reports is brought to you by:
FLAAR, a non-profit research institute dedicated for over three decades to improving the quality of photography in the museum and university environment. FLAAR has evolved from that previous position to encompassing digital photography and wide format inkjet printing since 1996. For six years, with 28 wide format printers having passed through our in-house facilities, FLAAR became the de facto world leader as an independent information source on digital imaging. FLAAR was in existence long before wide format inkjet printing or digital photography even existed. That makes it possible to remain as a reliable outside source of useful product reviews.
Then, now in 2010, FLAAR added evaluations of 3D portable scanning equipment as well as evaluating 3D rapid prototypers (especially those that use inkjet printheads from Canon, HP, and Ricoh).
More than 59,000 companies and individuals have downloaded the FLAAR reports in PDF format in order to figure out what hardware and software to purchase based on reviews, evaluations, and experiences of Nicholas Hellmuth and his team (of 17 people and growing). Our readership is over a million people, mostly from print shops, distributors, manufacturers, students, and faculty in the printing industry.
But today, for many years, the larger solvent and UV printers are not realistic to bring onto a university campus (the printers are too large and ventilation is not realistic in a campus building). Also, we do most of our evaluations of UV and solvent printers in the factories where they are manufactured so that we can see inside the printers and test them personally in the demo rooms. So it helps to be in a larger city with more printshops to inspect and with an airport so we can reach the different manufacturing sites. Plus, our staff grew to over 15 people, and most universities do not have space for a research program of this size, so we are presently more effective not on a campus.
In Ohio it was a three-hour drive just to get back and forth to an airport to fly to the manufacturing sites in Europe, Canada, Korea, China, Taiwan, and across the US. The senior research editor logged over 400,000 km in 2007 inspecting wide-format inkjet printers. That is about a quarter of a million miles in a single year, to take notes to add to the FLAAR Reports in order to bring our readers additional information. In 2011 the Senior Editor of FLAAR Reports logged well over 440,000 km (several thousand miles over a quarter of a million miles), especially as we expand our coverage to Brazil, China, Taiwan, and Korea.
Our reach is international in 2010, Dr Hellmuth has already been inspecting printers in Dubai (United Arab Emirates) and New Delhi, India. Our reach is international.
Most recently updated February 2012
Previously updated: December 29, 2011and earlier throughout 2011; and May 2010, February 1, 2010: January 2010, May 3, 2008, March, 2008 May 28, 2007, June 15, 2006, Nov. 12, 2005, July 7, 2005, November 10, 2003, August 20 2003, June 9, 2003, October 25, 2002, Nov. 12, 2002.
