Landa avoids financial failure

Posted on September 12, 2025 by Brian Lawler

In my last technical analysis of the Landa press, I mentioned that the company had gone to the Central District Court in Tel Aviv to seek bankruptcy protection. Facing about $500 million in debt, they hoped to prevent total failure by getting the court to rule in their favor, giving the company time to find new capital.

The judge in that matter, Hana Kitsis, made her ruling stating that it was smarter to allow the company to continue to operate under supervised protection than to force it into insolvency. This seems especially smart in my opinion because Landa’s salable assets in Israel are only $127 million. That, against its debt, doesn’t resolve the greater problem, and fails to supply continued support for its customers.

By granting a short – one week – extension, she gave them the time needed to find an investor, Israel’s FIMI Opportunity Funds, who rescued the company at the eleventh hour. This has not been a completely clean transaction, with FIMI arguing that some of the terms of its purchase were established without their consent. Regardless, FIMI has agreed to continue to pay the court-appointed financial supervisors while the transaction is completed and these disputes are settled.

The speed of the entire transaction is surprising to me, as similar situations in the graphic arts industry in the U.S. have taken years to resolve. This one was opened and closed in a matter of months.

Landa’s workforce – about 500 people in the Spring – has been reduced by layoffs to about 350, and this was also approved by the court-appointed supervisors.

The company has also suffered a number of crises not of their making. The Israeli war with Hamas, and Israel’s continued hostilities in Lebanon and Iran, have contributed tremendously to the troubles at Landa. About one quarter of Landa’s workforce are reservists in the Israeli military, and many of those workers have been in military service since the Hamas invasion in October, 2023.

Compounding this worker shortage is the fact that Tel Aviv is a common target in that conflict. On May 4 of this year, a missile fired by Houthi rebels in Yemen avoided Israeli air defenses and hit targets in the neighborhood of the Ben Gurion Airport, including the Landa facility. Though there were no fatalities, this was another setback to the imaging company.

Additional pressure on supplies coming through the Suez Canal and the Red Sea (attacks perpetrated by Houthi warriors) have adversely affected Landa. The printing press components in the Landa presses come from Komori in Japan, and those shipments have been slowed by the ongoing hostilities in the region.

Those delays, the ongoing war with Hamas and others, workers in conflict, incoming missile attacks, general chaos in Israel as a result of the war, and international uneasiness about doing business with any company on the border of military conflict have added to Landa’s endemic troubles.

The press, which has extraordinary capabilities, took many years and many millions of dollars more than predicted by Landa. Originally announced in 2012, the machine struggled to meet expectations, and was written-off by many pundits and even some supporters in the early years.

Benny Landa, the founder and brain-trust of Landa, is famous for being an eternal optimist, and is among the industry’s most talented and successful inventors. He is also guilty of more than an erroneous technology or sales prediction. His announcements were wrong by many years. But he was right about the primary capabilities of the machine. On that he was absolutely right.

The Landa press took longer than promised, or expected, to be delivered. Today, according to industry publications, there are 51 machines in 14 countries. At about $4 million each, complete, they are competitive in the marketplace. But apparently the company does not break-even on any press sale. Instead, they rely on ongoing support and consumable sales to be profitable in the long run. To me that makes little sense. Landa has not published the cost of manufacture, so we don’t know how much is lost on every sale.

This business philosophy, combined with other fickle market conditions, does not bode well for those daring enough to purchase one of these machines. If Landa were to become insolvent or be forced to liquidate (unlikely at the moment) where would its customers get ink, and the famous imaging belt?

How would any company with a Landa press survive the company’s failure?

Certainly after-market suppliers could step in to provide ink, and given time, even the belt. But it would cause severe disruptions in those operations that have invested in the Landa presses.

What will probably happen
My estimation of the situation is that the FIMI organization will help Landa to survive and succeed. Their track record is extraordinary, and this is not the first company-in-distress they have absorbed. FIMI has already announced that they will provide ample cash to Landa to allow it to continue to make presses and to support its existing customers. Then FIMI will fund an effort to grow Landa into a more successful company. The fact that the machine now works beautifully means that it has overcome the most significant hurdle to success. Now they need more customers.

When I look at the field of digital ink-jet printing machines I see a market with several impressive competitors, each producing one or more good offerings to the graphic arts industry. Most are devices that feed a niche market.

Kodak makes the Prosper series of presses. These machines produce stunning quality printing at very high speeds. The machines have been most successful in document printing, specifically bank statements, credit card statements, and collateral printing. They are much narrower, dramatically faster than the Landa, and more limited in the ability to print on various substrates. Prospers are web-fed.

Hewlett-Packard has its line of extraordinary web-fed PageWide ink-jet presses. These are very impressive machines, capable of printing on uncoated substrates. The company offers them in 22-inch width, and up to over 100-inch. These are used for book printing, business document printing, ballot printing, and other purposes. Probably the most important use is producing the faces for laminated packaging with corrugated liner added or other packaging substrates. Amazing speed, excellent quality, and the ability to scale for specific needs are the cornerstones of the PageWide presses.

Fuji makes a series of 74 cm. and 100 cm. ink-jet presses. Some of sheet-fed while one is web-fed. I don’t know as much about these as I should. I have seen output, and it looks good. I spoke with a sales person at Print United, and learned that the substrate selection is limited.

Komori, the company that makes the large components of the Landa press, makes a machine that is called Impremia. Looking at the company’s web site, it looks suspiciously like a Landa press. Coincidence? The company calls the machine a “Nanoprint” press, using one of the terms coined by Landa: Nanoprinting. Snooping around the web today I have learned that Komori has installed one in Japan, one in China, one in Germany, one in Canada and one in Kansas City at Boelte-Hall Printers there.

So, let’s assume that the Komori press is indeed a “Landa” machine, built with cross-licensed technologies from both companies. That boosts the importance of the Landa restructuring to an even higher plateau because it involves more customers in more countries.

I’m sure there are other production ink-jet offerings that I have not mentioned.

The printing industry cannot afford to have Landa fail. It’s simply too important to our industry that this innovative company continue to operate and prosper (apologies to Kodak).

I believe that the Landa press technology is the most important printing technology in the industry today. In the coming years we will see increased competition and improvements to the existing technology. Landa’s summertime announcement of the S20P press shows continued improvement. All of this is good for the industry. I am pleased that the Israeli court gave Landa enough breathing room to survive this financial situation, and that we will have Landa in the industry to provide excellent presses and excellent printing in the future.

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Thin lines and fine type

Posted on August 29, 2025 by Brian Lawler

This is the fourth in a series of analyses of the output of the Landa S10P press. If you would like to start at the beginning, click here.

Whenever a printer gets out a magnifying glass, there are bound to be conversations about the behavior of a printing process. That has been my focus, if you’ll excuse the pun, for these posts. My “magnifier” has been a clever new lens from Laowa, a new 2.5X “macro” lens for my Canon R5 camera. Because it magnifies more than 1:1, it is really a “micro” lens, but who cares about the title? What matters is that it’s a spectacular close-up lens that allows me to move in close enough to get images of these printed sheets that show how the machine is making its marks on the substrate.

Resolution of the press
The absolute resolution of the Landa press is 600 spi – machine spots per linear inch. I use that term to describe the smallest size of a single droplet of ink from the machine’s ink-jet heads. It cannot make a mark smaller than that. Compare that spot – 0.00167 inch (0.0042418 mm) – to the smallest mark possible on a Kodak Trendsetter platesetter – 0.00042 inch (0.01668 mm), when used to make aluminum printing plates for offset printing, and the Landa spots look large. But that is only when we have our magnifying glasses out. (The Trendsetter can make smaller spots, but is commonly set to this resolution.)

This diagram shows just how small a spot 1/600 inch is (too small to show on any computer display at this size). In the same space that the Landa S10P puts 600 droplets of ink, a Kodak Trendsetter will render 2,400 on an aluminum plate for offset printing. Both are almost too small to imagine, but they represent the state of the art for graphic arts imaging.

The secret to quality imaging is using the resolution of the machine to its fullest and making excellent images with the resolution available. Both processes do this handily, and without a magnifier it’s difficult or impossible to tell the difference.

All printing processes are designed to create the illusion of detail, or the illusion of tonality, in the eye of the beholder. That is the reality of our printing processes: illusory techniques. If done well, they are invisible to the viewer; it’s just an image, or it’s just lettering, or it’s a just a line on a printed page.

We in the graphic arts industry know that these marks on paper are much more than an image, lettering or a curvy line. Images on various substrates are created by technologies that have been under development for over a century, with the greatest concentration of technological development being in the past 40 years.

The parts of my test sheets that I analyzed for this post include those showing fine lines and very small type. These are clearly reproduced on the Landa machine, and the quality shows that the sophistication of the Fiery front-end on the machine has methods for handling extremely small elements effectively. Combining the Fiery software and the ink-jet delivery technology of the press, these images are visually comparable to those possible on offset presses with greater resolution.

This is the rendering of thin lines by the Landa S10P press. At the point highlighted in yellow, the minimum resolution is met. After that, all requested line weights are drawn with the same line thickness, that drawn by one ink-jet spot. Note the little line shift on all of these lines, just in from the left side. This indicates that the lines are not being drawn exactly 90 degrees to the paper path. I cannot explain this. Click on the image to enlarge it.

Too thin to print
Low threshold line thickness is a factor of any raster-image processor. It applies here. As the line thickness gets smaller, the machine draws lines with the closest number of ink droplets possible. This creates a small problem where line thicknesses are limited by the number of available machine spots. For example, with a minimum of one line of machine spots, the Landa press can draw a line as thin as 0.00167 inch in thickness. Lines with more weight are drawn with more than one row of ink-jet spots. But lines thinner cannot be rendered at all. So, the RIP will draw any line with a requested weight less than that 0.00167 inch at the same weight. To do otherwise would mean that the line would not be rendered at all, and that’s not an acceptable response.

Reversing those same lines out of black (or a rich black) creates a slightly more complex problem for the machine: it has to print up to, but not beyond the position of the white line, and then not print ink along that very small path.

This is the same line pattern, reversed. Interestingly, the little line jiggle isn’t present in these horizontal lines.

Angular anguish
These line weights assume that the ink-jet heads on the Landa machine are perfectly perpendicular to the paper path, and my micro-photos show that this is – almost – true. On the example shown there is a point where the thin line suddenly jumps one machine spot downward before continuing on its path. This could be the result of the ink-jet spots landing a microscopically small distance away from their target, or it could be that the original, which was drawn in Adobe Illustrator, is not “square” to the path of the ink-jet heads. On offset presses there are screen angles to consider; the Landa press does not have the exact analog, as it does not draw halftone dots. This makes imaging simpler, I think.

So, creating a very thin line at any angle other than zero or 90 degrees will certainly cause a jagged edge along its path. This is true for any raster imaging process.

Very small type
Type in very small sizes will challenge any imaging engine. Imagine how thin the crossbar of a capital A in Times Roman is when the type is being set at a common size like 12 pt. The same challenge that we face with thin lines applies to type: the thin lines of letters are very often thinner than the smallest machine spot available on the machine. So the RIP must overcome this by adding weight to the thinnest elements of letters in order to render them at all.

For this test, I set lines of Times and Helvetica at sizes starting at 8 pt. and getting smaller down to 1 pt. At that size, the letters are rendered on the press with only three or four machine spots (ink droplets). Curiously, it works. Even at 1 pt., the type is legible – barely. I have done this same test on offset presses and the same is true there, though there are four times as many machine spots available.

These are my samples of small type printed on the Landa press. Even 1-point type is legible! Click on the image to enlarge it.

Overall, the rendering quality of type on the Landa machine is extraordinary.

When we reverse-out white type on a black background on offset presses, we often create a multicolor or “rich black” screen combination for that background. This is to make the black more black – increasing the density and contrast of the printing. It also creates an opportunity for the lettering to get ruined by any small register error on press.

The Landa press does not need rich black to be effective. The density of a single-color black is adequate. But, I tried a rich black nonetheless, and the results are very good. Since the Landa press generally does not go out of register (it’s not impossible, but it’s very unlikely) the multicolor background with white reversed-out is rendered very effectively. I would argue that rich black colors are unnecessary on the Landa machine, as single-color black is dense enough to look perfect.

This is a thin italic type reversed out of black only. Click on the image to enlarge.
The same type reversed out of rich black: 20, 20, 10, 100. If you click on the image it will enlarge to fill your screen. There, you will be able to see individual colored ink-jet spots here and there, peeking out from the black surround.

Reg marks the spot!
And, speaking of register marks, I printed some using black only, CMYK, and CMYKOGB to see if the press shows any tendency of going out of register. It does not, though there are some individual color ink spots that are trying to sneak out from under their neighbors. That effect is nearly invisible, even at magnification.

Here is proof that register on the Landa press is essentially perfect. Both CMYK register marks and marks using all seven colors are in “perfect” register. Click on the image to enlarge.

Summary
The Landa S10P press does an extraordinary job of printing fine lines, fine type, and reversed-out lettering. Register of colors on the press is effectively perfect. Density of ink is excellent. The detail in the printed images is comparable to excellent quality offset printing, though the machine’s resolution is not as fine. The combination of an excellent imaging engine (the Landa part of the machine) and an excellent front-end processor (the Fiery part of the machine) make this press a quality production machine.

Something to try next time
It would be interesting to run the fine line and fine type tests at a slight angle, not zero or 90°. This would make any effect of lines not fitting the digital raster pattern of the machine stand out. It would be interesting to run the same test sheet with the entire page rotated slightly. That would really put the machine’s imaging engine to the test. It’s moderately expensive for me to run these tests, but I promise that I will do that on my next press sheet test.

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Printing high-resolution line art on the S10P

Posted on August 5, 2025 by Brian Lawler

Update: I have been reading about financial troubles at Landa. The company has asked for protection from its creditors in an event similar to Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the U.S. With over $500 million in debt, the company hopes to get court approval to reorganize their debt, or find other relief from their financial troubles. I will investigate and write about this in greater detail when I can.

Meanwhile… back to my analyses of the printing produced by this extraordinary machine:

Reproducing high-resolution line art

On the RGB sheet I had run on the Landa press I put a row of scans from copper engravings made in the late 19th century. These illustrations can be very challenging to reproduce.

It is uncommon in the world of graphic arts that we concern ourselves with the reproduction of scanned line art at very high resolutions. Line art illustrations were more common in the awkward era before the digital revolution of PostScript and high-resolution imaging (pre-1984). With analog graphic arts photography, the process was easier because the only limiting factor for resolution was the grain of litho film, which was effectively infinite compared to the rigid limitations that digital technologies place upon the same processes.

Defining line art
Before the invention of the photographic halftone process (credited to Frederic Ives in 1882), non-typographic illustrations – drawings mostly – were limited to inked and non-inked areas.

To reproduce “tonal” photos on printing presses, the most common type of illustration was the line engraving. These were typically made by artisans who engraved drawings into copper or steel plates (in earlier eras, they used hardwood). Using techniques including the control of line thickness, cross-hatching, and line shapes to create the illusion of tonality in an image, these craftspeople made extraordinarily nice illustrations in metal using hand engraving tools. To see a perfect example of this technique, examine any printed currency, which is still created by the hand engraving process.

This is a photomicrograph of the face of Abraham Lincoln from the U.S. $5 paper note. Enlarged like this you can see that the “tonality” of the image is imparted by lines whose thickness changes, whose contours follow his facial features, and crosshatching that adds additional detail. The original of this illustration was engraved by a craftsperson on a copper plate at the Bureau of Engraving and Printing in Washington, D.C.
The primary printing process for currency is sheet-fed intaglio, which is how this image was made. U.S. currency also has elements printed by offset lithography and letterpress.

If you look at a photomicrograph of the U.S. $5 note, you’ll see all of these techniques at play. Notice the circular lines around the corneas, the sculpted lines that run over Lincoln’s nose, and back down, and the crosshatching of the lines across his forehead. These are the techniques of a master engraver. There is only one color of ink used to print this illustration: black. It is the interaction of these clever engraving techniques with the paper that creates the illusion of tonality where there is none.

And it is those same lines and crosshatches that are so difficult to reproduce on many printing machines – including the Landa press. Electrophotographic machines (toner) also suffer with images of this type. Offset and non-roto intaglio certainly can reproduce images in this class. But, rotogravure is fatal to line images like this because the process converts everything into halftone-like patterns. A common example of this is text printed in the Sunday New York Times Magazine, which is printed by rotogravure.

Notice that all type (in fact, everything) printed by rotogravure has serration along its edges. It is visible in this example of 10 point type from the New York Times Magazine. Click on the image to enlarge.

It is ultimately the resolution of the machine itself that prevents this kind of illustration from being reproduced in a way that rivals offset lithography. The Landa presses use Fuji Dimatix ink-jet heads to make their marks on the paper (and other non-paper substrates). The resolution (addressability) of those ink-jet heads is 600 machine spots per linear inch. Fortunately for the Landa press, the machine spots created by the ink-jet heads are stunningly sharp, and their sharpness is not degraded as the ink is transferred to the substrate from the imaging belt (a continuous ribbon of plastic material that catches the ink from the nozzles, then, after being dried, transfers that ink with pressure to the substrate). See the press diagram below.

This is a diagram of the mechanism of the Landa s10P press. Click on the image to enlarge.

Now let’s compare that resolution to that of an aluminum printing plate on a sheet-fed offset press. The image of Mr. Luse, above, was printed on a Heidelberg CD74 offset press using Kodak plates. The imaging of the plate was done on a Kodak Trendsetter laser platesetter with its resolution set to 2,400 machine spots per linear inch – four times greater than the Landa press.

This is a macro photo of a portrait of a man named Henry Luse, made in the 19th century on a copper plate. This image was scanned at 2,400 pixels-per-linear inch (ppi) on an Epson scanner, then printed with an aluminum plate on a Heidelberg CD74 offset press with black ink only. Click on the image to enlarge.

For printing photos and other tonal graphics, the Landa presses produce images that are comparable to – and often better than – offset printing. But high-resolution line work seems to be the Achilles heel of the machine’s capabilities. Fortunately this does not hamper the press in the more typical processes, as scanned line art is seldom part of the modern graphic designer’s tools. These line art images are the only part of my test sheets that I would put in the fail category. The press just doesn’t have enough resolution to be effective at this.

This macro photo of Mr. Luse was scanned at 300 ppi, and saved as a monochrome .bmp file. The Landa press reproduced it fairly well, but it also introduced additional colors to make the image. Compared to the much higher-resolution image above, this is not as good, but the overall impression is nice. I am putting this image in the success category, despite its lower resolution, and the resolution limitations of the Landa press.

Yet it still works!
Microscopic analysis of the reproduction of line art on the Landa press shows some curious results. Two of the images I created are surprisingly good; the rest are not acceptable. And, I suspect that only the most discerning eye would see the difference between the reproduction of scanned line art as a “halftone” or as a bitmap in the two cases where I have had success. Since the Landa press does not draw actual halftone dots, the stochastic patterns created by the Fiery front end render the two successful images acceptably.

Thus, the fault is not so much in the ability of the press to print such extraordinary detail, but the file type I selected to reproduce the scanned images. Where I had success with images scanned at 2,400 ppi for an offset press and reproduced as bitmap images, the same files don’t print successfully on the Landa when saved as .bmp (bitmap) files. Saving the very-high resolution scan as a grayscale .psd file results in a perfectly acceptable reproduction on the Landa.

And, interestingly, the Landa uses multiple colors to render these images – not just black – which enhances their appearance somewhat.

I will score this as a success on the Landa S10P press (when files are saved in the correct file format). Advice: don’t use the .bmp file format for images to print on the Landa press. Instead, save such files as grayscale and save in Photoshop .psd format.

My next tests will be published in a couple of weeks. I’m going kayaking!

Posted in Art, Color Management, History, New technology, Photography, Photoshop techniques, Printing and Printing Processes, Scanning, Technology | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Not printing colors that the press can print

Posted on July 17, 2025 by Brian Lawler

Note: Landa recently announced a new version of their press, the S11P. The most significant difference is speed. Where the presses I have tested print 6,250 two-sided impressions per hour, the new Landa press can print at twice that speed. This puts the S11P squarely in competition with most B1-size offset presses (28 x 40 inch). Other benefits accrue as a result.

This is the second in a series of posts about the Landa S10P press and its capabilities. To read the first post, please click here.

In the previous post I explained how I was attempting to profile the color capabilities of a Landa S10P press, using its seven-color gamut on an excellent coated paper (same paper used when profiling for GRACoL in the U.S.).

This is the X-Rite Isis 2 XL spectrophotometer reading the patches from a sheet printed on the Landa S10P press at Brodnax 21C Printers in Dallas, Texas. The process is relatively fast, taking just minutes to make all the readings.

I had the printer, Brodnax 21C, in Dallas, Texas, print two different press sheets on their machine. One is populated by RGB source files, the other primarily with CMYK images.

Today’s discussion is about profiling the Landa S10P, and specifically about making an ICC profile for that press printing from both an RGB test target set, and one in CMYK, both generated by X-Rite’s i1 Profiler software. The RGB target is a “standard” 2033-patch set with the colors designated as RGB values. I have run this target many times, on many devices, all ink-jet printing machines that expect RGB as source files. The CMYK target is an ECI target.

While teaching in Germany in 2021-22, I used a Landa press to make a similar test sheet, then I visited the labs at FOGRA, Germany’s printing industry research organization, to measure the results and make the profile. I declared it a “failure” because the profile was almost identical to sRGB, which is the second-smallest color gamut in the industry. I was convinced by that experience that it was my error, and that I had not prepared something correctly, I had not used the correct target, or had made some other error.

Despite my profiling “failure” in Munich in 2021, the rest of my test sheet revealed several important things, one of which was that the color space we had chosen to use – ProPhoto RGB – was not acceptable, because the Landa machine, and its Fiery front-end, did not manage the color in that space correctly. It made our photos look muddy, We switched, mid-project, to Adobe RGB, which is a less voluminous color space, and which has many fewer potential colors inside its envelope. That one discovery saved our project, preventing a disastrous printing job.

This year’s test was similar. I put a standard i1 Profiler target set of 2,033 patches on the RGB sheet, and sent the file to Brodnax. The visual impact of that target set is lovely. It looks great. The CMYK test target set is similarly nice, though it doesn’t look as beautiful.

I also had a benchmark for this year’s test sheet – a reproduction of that same 2,033-patch target set printed on another ink-jet machine with more than four colors of ink. This machine is the Epson P9000, which prints with CMYK, Orange and Green (it also has “light magenta,” light cyan and two “light blacks”). The profile that my students made from that target set is glorious. It shows what an expanded-gamut printer can do.

When in Germany, I had nothing against which to compare the performance of the Landa S10P press. This time it would be different. Both are ink-jet machines, both use water-based inks, and both are printing on a premium paper (the Epson paper is glossier, but still a comparable medium). If anything, the absence of a blue ink on the Epson should give the Landa an advantage.

My testing process is common: run the test sheet, then read the sheet with a spectrophotometer (an X-Rite Isis 2 XL), then use i1 Profiler to calculate and create the profile, using ICC v4 standards for the calculations.

I run my analyses in ColorThink Pro 4 from Chromix. That software is the latest version for color profile analysis and editing. It is capable of making visual comparisons in CIELab color, CIEYxy, LUV, and two other less common color spaces. I used both Yxy and Lab for these analyses. The data are the same.

This is the gamut chart posted on the Landa web site. It shows the colors of CMYK offset, RGB and their S10P press superimposed on the CIELab color space (but reversed left-to-right). I have flopped it here so the color space matches my analyses, below.

On Landa’s web site they show a CIELab graph of the color of their press, claiming 86 percent coverage of the Pantone library. I have no reason to doubt their claim, and was hoping that my profiling would prove their claim to be correct. (Note: in October, 2024 I profiled a BenQ RGB display that claims 98 percent coverage of Adobe RGB. I was skeptical, but found that their display is slightly better than they claim!)

The graph used on the Landa site is shown in CIELab color (but, oddly, flipped horizontally). I have flipped their chart here so that the colors in my analyses are represented in approximately the same coordinates, and along the axes commonly used in color analysis (red at the top with 0° hue angle, green 120° counter-clockwise, and blue 240° counter-clockwise from red. This also aligns with the CIELab charts in ColorThink Pro, in i1 Profiler, Adobe Photoshop, and others).

This chart shows how the Landa press prints colors from RGB source files, compared to the color gamut the Epson P9000 ink-jet printer. Those are superimposed on the sRGB color space, which is the second-smallest common color space in the industry.

I made a profile of the seven-color output on the Landa press, taken from the RGB test patch set of 2,033 color patches. Then I made a profile of the CMYK target (printed with all seven colors) using the ECI 2002 CMYK random patch set. In both cases, I measured the output with an X-Rite Isis2 XL spectrophotometer.

Once the profiles were made, I opened each for analysis in ColorThink Pro 4, the most recent analysis tool from Chromix. Using the CIELab color space for these tests, I compared the RGB results to those I got from an earlier test of our Epson P9000 ink-jet printer on Epson glossy photo paper. This paper is glossier than the C2S SAPPI paper used to print my test sheets on the Landa press.

Curiouser: The gamut of colors printed by the Landa S10P is very similar to the gamut of an offset press on a C2S sheet. The gamut of colors is very slightly smaller than GRACoL, despite there being more potential on this press.

The gamut of colors of the Landa S10P seems to be limited to, or very closely aligned with the sRGB color space, which is disappointing, because sRGB is the second-smallest common RGB color space in the industry. This is exactly what I experienced at FOGRA in Munich in 2021; then I assumed that I was at-fault, that I had chosen the wrong RGB target patch set, or that I had handled the target file incorrectly, converting it accidentally to sRGB (default on most installations of Adobe Photoshop). It turns out that the same target patch set printed on the Epson P9000 generates a dramatically larger color gamut. This proves that it’s the management of the color on the Landa prepress system (a Fiery) and not my handling of the file, that caused this constraint.

The CMYK color patch set, the ECI 2002, produced a much different result: it aligns almost exactly with the GRACoL color gamut, that used for measuring and certifying the output of offset presses in the United States. I will test this against one of the FOGRA 37 and 39 CMYK color gamuts in another blog post..

And here is the mystery of this experience, so far:

This chart shows colors that are exclusive to the RGB and CMYK gamuts of the S10P press. The mystery here is that there are colors that can be printed using CMYK source image that are outside the gamut of colors printed on the same machine and paper. The machine can print those colors, so why is it not printing those colors? It seems to me that the press should be able to print all of the colors on this chart (which is certainly can do), yet it does not seem to do that.

With such a potentially huge color gamut (as promised by Landa), what is preventing the S10P from printing colors outside the gamut of sRGB on the RGB front, and outside of GRACoL on the CMYK front?

As a closing thought, I made a chart of exclusive colors on both sheets – remember these are printed on the same machine, using the same seven colors of ink, at the same time on the same paper – there are patches of color that are exclusive to each color space, but ironically inside the opposite color space. These are colors that can be printed with CMYK, and colors that can be printed by RGB (converted to CMYK-Red-Green-Blue in the Fiery) that cannot be printed by CMYK colors (and also processed by the Fiery to the gamut of colors on the Landa). This is illogical, since they obviously can be printed by the machine on that substrate at the same time.

Why would a printing press have colors that it can print not print?

I’ll leave that for us to ponder until the next post.

Posted in Art, Color Management, Graphic Arts people, New technology, Photography, Photoshop techniques, Printing and Printing Processes, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Exploring the capabilities of the Landa S10P press

Posted on June 30, 2025 by Brian Lawler

I recently finished a year teaching at Cal Poly. I retired from that institution in 2020, and was rehired last year to fill-in for a colleague on leave. The course I taught was Color Management, which I had taught for 22 years during my career at Cal Poly. Stepping back into the classroom was interesting, fun, and sometimes quite challenging. I enjoyed working with students again, and I found them to be eager and hard working.

When I was last in the classroom, we had a Heidelberg CD74 four-color offset lithographic press. We had three of these machines over the previous 34 years, and the most recent machine was installed in 2006. I always enjoyed having the freedom to experiment with that machine, and I incorporated press tests in several of my courses using the press as a test bed. It was a fabulous tool.

This is the first of two press test sheets my students and I created for the Landa S10P press. It was printed on a glossy text weight paper in both CMYK, and CMYK plus Orange, Blue and Red for our analysis. Most of the items on this sheet were in RGB color.

After I retired (perhaps because I retired?), Heidelberg removed the press from Cal Poly, and we now have only a single-color Heidelberg GTO offset press. Though it’s a lovely machine, it’s not what I was used to having, and we never print full-color projects on that machine; it’s too difficult.

The year after my retirement, I taught for one year at Hochschule München, the Munich University of Applied Sciences. That university is the sister school of Cal Poly; we have numerous exchange programs there, and we regularly send students and faculty there as part of the exchange.

Munich has a graphic communication program that is very similar to the Cal Poly program. Interestingly, they have a two-color Heidelberg 74 cm. press that is used to teach offset lithography. Like our small press, it is never used for full-color printing, as it’s very difficult to do that.

This is the second press test sheet we created. This one features mostly CMYK images and graphics.

While teaching in Munich, I was invited to see a new Landa S10P printing press at Blue Print, a commercial plant on the outskirts of the city. Our faculty gathered there and we were shown this amazing machine that had recently been installed. The Landa press uses nanographic ink-jet technologies developed at the Landa headquarters in Tel Aviv, Israel. It is a production size machine (28 x 40 inches) that produces two-sided full-color printing that rivals, and often exceeds, the quality of fine offset lithography.

After that demonstration, I had that printing firm publish a book written and illustrated by my students, about which I wrote in several posts. You can read about the machine and the students’ work here.

In 2023 I was invited to visit two Landa press installations in the U.S., both in Dallas, Texas. These plants use the Landa presses for both commercial and packaging printing.

This year, while teaching at Cal Poly, I decided to incorporate the Landa press in my curriculum. It would have been impossible to have the students travel to Texas (or anywhere) to see the machines, but I did the next-best thing. My students and I developed a pair of test sheets to be run on the Landa press that we would later evaluate as a part of our study of color management in general, and of the Landa S10P press in particular.

I arranged to have these sheets printed at Brodnax 21C Printers in Dallas, Texas. Jim Singer, co-owner at Brodnax, facilitated this project, and made it possible for my students and me to have these sheets printed for the course.

This blog post, and several that will follow, are the fruits of our labor. I will describe the test sheets we made, and share with you the results of those tests. These results are, to the best of my abilities, reflective of the capabilities of the Landa press, and they reveal the strengths, and some weaknesses, of this technology.

The concept of a press test sheet
I have made scores of press test sheets over the years as a teacher. These contain photos in various formats, text in very small sizes, line art, solid-color patches, reverse-out printing, very subtle color tints, ICC profile test patch sets, rich-black tests, and as many things as I can fit on a page that will challenge the technology being tested.

In Munich, my students and I made a test sheet that was printed by the commercial firm. From that test sheet I was planning to generate an ICC profile that would describe the color gamut of the Landa press. I included one of the many available test patch sets used for profiling a press. I then visited the headquarters of FOGRA, the German printing research organization, to measure the press sheet, and it was an utter failure. For some reason that I was never able to pin-down, the profile described a gamut of colors that was about the same volume as the sRGB color space.

This is about the opposite of the capabilities of the Landa press, which the manufacturer suggests will print over 90 percent of the Pantone color library. sRGB, by comparison, is about 20 percent of that gamut. Something was wrong about my efforts to measure the capabilities of the press.

Despite that failure, though, my press test sheet yielded some very important results that my students and I used to our advantage when we published our book (more on that as I continue here).

Regions of the press test sheet
On these recent test sheets, I wanted to see how the Landa S10P press behaves with the following:

1. Color profile test patches – both RGB and CMYK

2. Color images in both RGB and CMYK

3. Embedded profiles – a wide variety from sRGB to ProPhoto RGB

4. Color file formats: PSD, TIFF, SCT, PNG, Lab

5. Grayscale file format: PSD

6. Duotone image, saved as Photoshop EPS, with three select Pantone colors

7. Very small type

8. Very fine lines – positive and negative

9. Text reversed-out of black, and text reversed-out of rich black

10. Line art scans of very fine line engravings at 300, 600, 800, 2300 and 2400 ppi

11. Halftone scan of the same engraving

12. 0-255 grayscale ramp in RGB

13. 0-100% ramps of Cyan, Magenta, Yellow and Black, separately

14. A named Pantone color

15. A trapping opportunity (four colors all intersecting)

I chose photos that would challenge a CMYK press: an orange pick-up truck, orchids with strong violet and purple colors, a hot-air balloon with a rainbow pattern, very strong red and blue colors in an RGB image, a highly saturated photo in RGB and the same photo in CMYK.

I know that the S10P press uses a Fiery front-end, and I had the printer run the job with CMYK color and CMYK plus Orange, Violet and Red (I was unaware that the press could be run in CMYK only).

I wanted to stress the system as much as I could to determine if there are weaknesses, or file types, or color spaces that the Fiery/Landa would choke on. Interestingly, all of the file types I included printed successfully.

The same cannot be said of embedded color profiles. I printed from smallest gamut to largest gamut:

sRGB, Adobe RGB, eciRGB, ProPhoto RGB

I also printed one large photo with Adobe RGB for half of the image, and the GRACoL profile in CMYK for the other half.

When I ran a similar test in Munich, the Landa press there did not reproduce the image with ProPhoto RGB embedded well. It was muddy, and unacceptable. My students and I regrouped and saved our files in Adobe RGB for the final book printing.

In the coming weeks, I will write posts about how the press performed on all of these challenges. It has been an interesting process, one that revealed some unexpected results, and some very pleasant surprises.

Check in here in a few days to read the next post.

Posted in Art, Color Management, Education, Photography, Photoshop techniques, Printing and Printing Processes, Scanning, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Failing to profile a direct-to-garment T shirt press

Posted on June 5, 2025 by Brian Lawler

At Printing United last year I visited the Aeoon Technologies booth, where I met Austin Thom who runs a business in Oregon printing digital images on T shirts with one of these machines. I was dazzled by the quality of the shirts the company was showing. Even those – especially those – that had been washed a number of times still showed brilliant color and did not seem to have lost their brilliance to the laundry.

My three T shirt muses model the direct-to-garment shirts. It is unfortunate that we were unable to make a profile of the printer that makes these images.

Aeoon makes five machines for printing on T shirts and other garments. The machines vary mostly in throughput. Some have two pallets for printing while one has three. The quality and features are otherwise similar. One of their machines is a hybrid that combines a traditional screen-printing system with an ink-jet printer in one unit.

All are CMYK ink-jet printers with the ability to print a white under-print (either solid or tonal). This allows printing on non-white fabrics with extraordinary quality.

The resolution of the printers ranges from 600 and up to 2,400 dpi. One of the samples I brought home from the show features only lettering, approximately 5 point type, in white, printed on a gray shirt. The legibility is stunning; the sharpness is extraordinary. I was amazed by the quality.

This is a close-up of the very small type on a sample shirt provided by Aeoon. I have provided a measuring device along the edge so you can get a good idea of the quality of the image on the shirt. Click to enlarge.

I haven’t ordered shirts recently, so I kept the business card and the sample shirts on my desk, and shelved the idea of ordering shirts from Austin’s company until last month. I created a design and had him run two sample shirts with full-color printing on a Port Authority black shirt. As part of that design, I generated a white plaque to under-print my design so it would be visible on the black garments.

I have been teaching at Cal Poly this school year, returning to the classroom after four years of retirement (one of them teaching in Munich). My course is Color Management, a third-year offering that is required for students in our bachelor’s degree program in Graphic Communication, and is also required for students in the university’s Art & Design program who are majoring in photography.

Among the topics I teach is profiling printing machines. This involves printing a color target, then measuring the printed target with a spectrophotometer, and building an ICC profile with the acquired measurements. Our department currently has several electrophotographic printers (Xerox, Ricoh, Konica-Minolta). The most capable of those is the Konica-Minolta. We also have several ink-jet machines (Epson, HP). We also have a Mark Andy flexo press with eight units, and a couple of very large format UV ink-jet printers.

What we don’t have anymore is a large format Heidelberg multi-color press. We had Heidelberg presses for over 30 years while the company was able to place a machine in our plant. But, times have changed, and Heidelberg removed their beautiful machine in 2020, and did not replace it.

This is one of two pages of color targets I had printed on the direct-to-garment shirts. The other page was printed on the back of each shirt.

I reached out to the Oregon T shirt printer for my students in Color Management. This would expose the students to machines and printing technologies not available in our region, and would also allow us to examine and measure printed output from cutting-edge machinery in this course.

I decided to measure the output of the Aeoon direct-to-garment press. I prepared a profile test target set for CMYK, and sent the files off to Newberg, Oregon, asking them to print the target sets on both black, and white shirts. For both the black and white I had them print a white under-base, and I also had them print on the white shirts without under-base white. They returned the finished goods to me a few days later, and they are beautiful.

I have been using X-Rite’s i1 Profiler software for many years, and before that, ProfileMaker, Color Blind, and a number of other profiling programs since the advent of color management in the early 1990s. This is a limited-market field for software developers, as there are a relatively small number of buyers of such software. I am grateful that X-Rite has kept their profiling software current.

Here, the i1 IO instrument is reading the color patches on my second attempt at profiling a T shirt printer. This example was printed on a Roland direct-to-film printer, then transferred to the shirt in a heat press. This also failed!

With some difficulty, I put the printed shirts on top of an X-Rite i1 IO automated spectrophotometer and instructed that device to read the color patches on the shirts. When the IO encounters irregular surfaces like T shirt cloth, it slows down. For this project it slowed down all the way. Reading one side with 756 patches took about 45 minutes. The other side took as long. And, it took numerous tries to get the readings. On one pass I exited the i1 Profiler program to read my e-mail. i1 Profiler does not play well with other software, and when I returned, the program quit, angry that I had attempted to multi-task.

On the second attempt, my machine fell asleep about half-way into the first side. Waking it up caused the same problem, and I failed again. I installed a program called Jolt of Caffeine on my MacBook, and told the machine not to fall asleep for two hours. That worked. But the software, in Row 26 of 27, stopped reading and never started again. Arghh! Each of these attempts took about an hour.

On Try Number Seven I was successful in reading the entire front of the shirt. Then, after reading the back, I received an error telling me that there was too much variability in the patch readings. My only option: quit. So, I failed on the black shirt, and decided to read the white shirt (with white under-base). After 90 minutes of reading, I got the same error. So I declared defeat, and sulked for a while.

This is the charming error message I received from the i1 Profiler software after over an hour of reading the colors on the T shirts. There is no recovery from this error. I simply had to give up.

Since there is no way to repair this error, I can’t retry.

Plan B, or maybe C:

In our department at Cal Poly, we have a Roland Direct-to-Film printer that makes heat-transfer films for T shirts. I decided to take the same artwork and have it printed on two T shirts using the direct-to-film technique. One of my students made the film on the Roland printer, and transferred those images to two black shirts with white underbase (instead of printing front and back of one shirt).

They look great! The colors are vibrant, and everything looked like it was on the right track. I mounted the first of the shirts on the i1 IO spectrophotometer and began the process of profiling the Roland/transfer process. I had high hopes. After the initial calibration, the IO asks you to identify the corners of your patch sets. I did this and received a new error: the dimensions of the target set are incorrect. There was no recourse. I had to quit.

At least it didn’t wait for an hour, attempting to read the shirt before telling me that the dimensions were wrong.

I declared defeat and gave the T shirts to a couple of my students. On to another project now!

Posted in Adventures, Art, Color Management, Photoshop techniques, Printing and Printing Processes, Technology | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

A grave assignment

Posted on March 5, 2025 by Brian Lawler

I am a lifelong friend and associate of Jim Eckford, who, with his wife Carlen, operate the Rancho Burro Donkey Sanctuary in Arroyo Grande, California.

The sanctuary has been in business for over 20 years, and has been home to as many as 16 burros and a couple of mules during that time. The animals come from various places, they are usually in jeopardy or grave danger, and at the sanctuary they are given lifetime homes. They are treated extremely well there.

The Eckfords also provide me with a place to have my wood shop, on the second floor of their barn at Rancho Burro. There I make stuff, fix things, and get into all sorts of trouble. There I have my tools, including the Avid CNC machine that I have written about in these posts over the years. I also have the usual table saws, band saws, sanders, planers, and dust collection systems that make my shop a great place to work.

When the sanctuary needs a cabinet or a sign or a repair, I am often called to provide these things. I do it with a smile, because I have become a part of the sanctuary family. And I have been friends with the donkeys as long as they have been housed there.

And, over the years, some of the donkeys have died, usually as a result of disease or incurable injuries that were incurred before they became members of the Rancho Burro family. Those donkeys have been buried on the property in a small graveyard where they can be remembered by the people who loved and cared for them.

We needed a way to honor them, so I designed a grave marker to identify each of them.

This is the basic grave marker master pattern. The final markers are about 20 inches tall and 9 inches wide.

These grave markers had to meet a set of criteria: they have to be weatherproof, sturdy, easy to read, reasonably easy to make, and able to withstand the sun and weather for a long period of time.

Our common friend, Steve Triplett, who is a master luthier and maker of beautiful harps, comes into the story at this point. He owns a saw mill. Steve is a volunteer at the donkey sanctuary, and has provided much love to the donkeys. I turned to him with my list of grave marker criteria, and he told me that he had just what I need: Black Locust lumber.

The lumber in question he milled from a tree that fell near the town of Santa Margarita, about 20 miles from my home. He sliced the log into two-inch boards and “stickered” them in piles behind his shop. There, they have been drying for over a year (lumber dries very slowly outdoors).

He and I took a few of those boards and re-sawed them on his giant band saw into one-inch boards. I took those to my shop where I planed them to a slightly thinner size, and sanded them to smooth finished lumber.

Then I designed the grave markers in Adobe Illustrator, sharing the designs with Jim and Carlen, and getting their approval of the plan.

I ordered some epoxy resin from a company called Total Boat, and ordered a small bottle of black colorant for that epoxy. Then I made a prototype grave marker.

The technique is to make the design in Illustrator, then modify it very slightly so that it will cut correctly on the CNC machine. Mostly this involves correcting the thin parts of letters very slightly to ensure that the 1/16 inch cutter I use to rout the pattern into the wood is cleared.

I use a lovely type font called Arno Pro, designed by Robert Slimbach of Adobe Systems. Even using the bold variation of that font, there are usually some thin lines that are less than 0.0625 inch across. This would cause the CNC software to skip those lines, creating gaps in the lettering. To overcome this problem, I draw a 1/16 inch red circle in Illustrator, and I drag it around the design and put it into the thin parts of the lettering. Where the red dot is larger than the stroke of the letter, I adjust the anchor points of the type as little as possible to get the red dot to clear. That ensures that the lettering will be cut correctly on the grave markers.

Here is the lettering for a dog named Levi. I put the red dot in the thinnest areas of the letters to test their width. If the dot is larger than the stroke of the letter, I modify its anchor points very slightly to ensure that the CNC machine will cut that part of the letter.

I drew a donkey silhouette in Illustrator, working from a photo, and use that to cut the image of the donkey into the grave marker. When the family’s old farm dog died last year I added the outline of a Golden Retriever to my Illustrator library, and this year I added a cat image to make a grave marker for our favorite barn cat, who died of old age.

This is the grave marker for Henry, who died late last year. The bas relief routing is 0.125 deep, cut by two end mill cutters: the donkey and the lettering by a 0.0625 cutter, and the border with a 0.125 cutter.

I put these elements together to make the grave markers, and then I cut the images into the Black Locust lumber. It’s nothing fancy: I rout the images 1/8 inch deep into the wood with a tiny 0.0625 cutter. When finished, I sand the surface, and fill the bas relief with black epoxy.

This is the grave marker for a donkey named Henry. I have poured black epoxy resin into the bas relief of the CNC routing, where it will harden. After that, I sand the board in a drum sander and that creates a clean image of the lettering and the donkey silhouette in the wood.

When the epoxy is hard, I run the board through my drum sander, which removes the epoxy above the top surface, leaving a beautiful, crisp image of the donkey (or dog or cat) and the border in the surface of the wood.

Here are four of the grave markers ready for their concrete bases.

To hold the markers so that they can be put into the ground, I have several inches of the board that goes below the lettering. In that part I cut four holes, and into those holes I insert more Black Locust wood to make cross-braces.

Then I suspend the grave marker with the cross bars in a mold that I built, and I pour 12 pounds of wet cement into the mold, creating a base for the grave marker that will keep it straight and solid when put in the ground. The cement also protects the wood from getting wet and rotting in the ground.

This grave marker has its cross-ties inserted and is suspended in the mold. I pour a soupy mix of cement into the mold, using a grade of cement called “SPEC” which has no aggregate. The grave marker sits in this mold for two days while the cement hardens. Then I break it out and use the mold again.

In the end, I apply Watco Danish Oil to the Locust wood, which makes the lettering really stand out against the natural color of the wood. When that oil dries, I apply a coat of Spar Varnish to protect the wood outdoors (I am skeptical about this, but time will tell).

After curing in the mold for two days, I break the grave marker out, and clean the mold to reuse it for the next one.

Here are seven of the nearly finished grave markers with their concrete bases. I will apply a coat (maybe two!) of Spar Varnish to the wood, and then they will go into the graveyard to mark the resting places of our departed donkey (and dog and cat) friends.

The grave markers look very nice, and I am confident that they will be lovely when placed in the sanctuary’s graveyard. We plan to place them in the coming weeks (as soon as the rain stops).

With those we can remember our donkey friends and show respect for their time on this earth.

Posted in Art, Building things, Woodworking | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

The Smyth book sewing machine is an extraordinary device

Posted on March 4, 2025 by Brian Lawler

For over five years I have been working to restore a 1935 Smyth book sewing machine. You can read several posts on that topic here, mostly related to the mechanics of getting the machine running after a long dormancy, and subsequent electrical and electronic improvements to get the machine turning again.

The machine is part of the collection in the Shakespeare Press Museum at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California.

This is the working part of the Smyth machine. It has blocks to hold up to eight needles, and up to eight crochet hooks. The threads come in from the top of the machine and wend their way to the needles. Stitching is an elaborate process of thread being poked through a hole in the saddle of a signature, passed to a crochet hook, then passed back through the needle hole and out again. The result is a sturdy sewn book block, ready for a cover.

I had declared in one of those posts that I had succeeded in getting the machine to work again. This was not entirely correct. I had the machine making single rows of chain stitches using its needles only. It was not making the cross-threads inside each signature, nor the chain stitches that run parallel to the primary stitches. At the time I was unconcerned that it wasn’t behaving perfectly. At least it was behaving.

My unconcern was rooted in the fact that there was no demand for Smyth-sewn book blocks in our department. No one was hankering for this service. This despite the fact that Cal Poly teaches a class called Book Design Technology where students learn how to sew and bind books, and they study machine sewing and binding in the process.

The instructor of that class, Prof. Donna Templeton, asked me late last year to demonstrate the machine for her students. I did so, but I was frustrated by not being able to demonstrate it working perfectly.

This is a close-up of the machine as I have it configured for 7-inch book blocks. The red dots indicate needles while the blue dots indicate crochet hooks. Each pair of needles and hooks make two parallel rows of chain stitches.

Dr. Templeton asked me, in January of this year, if I could get the machine working in time for the students in our TAGA chapter to use for their annual technical journal production. I said yes. (TAGA is the Technical Association of the Graphic Arts.)

Then I began the process of troubleshooting the 90-year-old machine to solve the stitching problems.

I have the instruction/parts book that came with the machine. I read it from cover to cover. I attempted to adjust the variable settings on the machine, and I tried numerous times to get the parallel stitches to work. It didn’t respond.

Needles are similar to sewing machine needles, with a trough down the narrow end to accommodate the thread before it passes through the eye.

Then I dug in. I knew the machine inside and out, having disassembled and reassembled most of it, after it arrived in the museum. I understood in principle how the sewing process works, and I had visited a bindery in Los Angeles County to see their machine, one identical to ours, running. I took photos and videos, and I had an hour of training on the machine so I could operate it.

Crochet hooks are the same length as the needles, and are adjacent to them. Unlike the needles, though, the crochet hooks rotate after catching the thread, then pull the thread up and out of the signature. Once outside, they rotate back, and carry the loop to the next signature, where they drop it and catch the next thread, pulling the new loop through the previous one, and creating a chain stitch (see the illustration below for more on this).

Back in the museum I sat, frustrated, in front of it, feeding folded signatures into the machine, and having it poke holes and stitch single rows of thread through the spines of those signatures. The signatures were not sewn firmly together, nor would they stay together after they were sewn.

The punches are mounted under each needle and crochet hook. They poke holes in the spine of each signature that allow the needles and hooks through to make the stitches.

I tried to understand the thread tension adjustments, thinking that I could make successful book blocks by tightening the tension. That didn’t work. I read the troubleshooting guide in the original manual to no avail. It was just not working correctly.

Eventually I removed all the needles and crochet hooks from the machine, and figured out how to remove the punches (see the illustrations for more on these components). I scrubbed all the parts and surfaces with solvent. With these parts now sparking clean, I started over, putting new needles and crochet hooks into their blocks. I put the original punches back also, being careful to place them opposite each needle or crochet hook (this is essential). Once I had them all lined up, I tried again to sew book signatures. The machine refused my efforts, continuing to make rows of straight chain stitches and no more.

So I stared at the machine. And stared, assuming that I would eventually see what was wrong.

At one point I disassembled the saddle mechanism again so that I could analyze the operation of the needles, hooks and punches. Inside the saddle is a component called the Loop Hook Bar. It carries eight loop hooks across against the back of the needles. The purpose is to snag the thread from each needle and carry it over to the right, then hang that thread on one of eight adjacent crochet hooks.

This is the seven-step process for sewing a single signature. All of this happens in about one second. Subsequent signatures are sewn together by repeating this process. Click on the image to enlarge.

I turned the machine by hand, observing the Loop Hooks as they moved from left to right. I noticed that they were not hooking the threads at all. They were arriving too late; they moved to the right, then retreated back to the left, leaving the threads on their respective needles. I couldn’t figure it out.

The Smyth machine is cam-operated. The machine has a common driveshaft that runs through the center of the machine, and on that shaft are nine cams, each about 14 inches in diameter. Some of those cams have patterns cut into their faces; some have patterns cut into their rims. Some have both. One of those cams causes the needle bar to descend into the spine of a signature, then to pull the needle bar back up, lifting all of the needles and their threads back out. Another drives the Loop Hooks left and right.

My observation was that the Loop Hook Bar was out of time with the other parts of the machine. It was arriving late and retreating early. I crawled on the floor with my brightest flashlight and examined the operation of the cam that operates that bar. It was the only one that made sense. I loosened its setscrews with a socket wrench, and attempted to rotate it relative to the other cams. It wouldn’t budge.

This is a diagram of the two rows of chain stitches. Each pair of rows is made with the same thread, passing back and forth inside the signature. The thread enters the signature on the left (carried by the needle), then it travels to the right, and out (crochet hook row) and is twisted into a loop. Then the thread continues back down into the signature, and over to the left where it re-emerges with the needle and is stitched to the next signature. It’s all one thread that makes this dizzying path.

While down on the floor I noticed that all of the cams on the machine are keyed to a common key-way that runs along the main driveshaft. Each cam has a setscrew that is tightened into the key-way. In theory, if each cam is aligned with the key-way, the machine cannot be out of sync.

The machine was confounding. It refused to work; it refused to be in time, and thus it would never sew the parallel lines of stitches that make Smyth-sewn books so sturdy.

I made another trip to Los Angeles to visit a book bindery where there is a working Smyth machine. This one is younger than ours. It’s a Model 15 (ours is a Model 12). It was probably manufactured in the 1950s. Its serial number is in the thousands. Ours is in the hundreds. I was allowed to take plates off and look at the workings of this machine; I stitched a couple of book blocks. I took photos and videos, and I brought samples home that I had made on that machine.

I readjusted our machine and studied its behavior. It was just crazy. It did everything out of time, with the punches coming up after the needles retreated.

Pressure: I am working on a deadline here. The students’ books must be sewn in the next week. The machine must work in time for this project to be completed. I was on hooks and needles trying to solve the problem (the traditional phrase was pins and needles, but this is close enough).

I stared at it, and studied its behavior again and again. I was stumped.

At one point I was inching the machine through its steps, and the Loop Hooks missed again. I backed the machine up to see it more closely. I turned the handwheel forward and backward. And when I turned it backward a second time I realized that the timing was correct when I turned it backward!

Was our machine running backward?

I inched it backward a few times and observed that it worked correctly when in reverse. This was entirely my fault. I assumed that the machine (and its handwheel) turned clockwise when running. I wired the motor to turn clockwise. And I have been running it clockwise for several years now, and it has not been sewing books correctly exactly that long.

I had never observed the rotational direction of either of the two working machines I visited. Both of them in fact operate with the drive wheel turning counter-clockwise! Since I had never seen a Smyth machine run prior to installing the new motor, I assumed that it would turn clockwise. Why would it not?

So (or sew…) this morning I rewired the motor to turn counter-clockwise. That took just minutes (three-phase motors can be made to run in reverse by switching any two of the three power wires). I started it up, and it now turns counter-clockwise.

I carefully checked the position of all the needles, crochet hooks and punches, tightened everything and cleaned all the handling surfaces. Then I turned it on and fed a signature into the machine. The punches come up through the spine; the needles and crochet hooks then come down through the holes made by the punches. The Loop Hook Bar slides from left to right, catching all of the threads (all but one in my case) and pulls them over to the crochet hooks. Then the Loop Hook Bar returns to the left, and the needles and crochet hooks retreat upward and out of the signature, carrying the thread with them.

It works! For the first time in our possession of the machine, it works!

This is a close-up of the spines of numerous signatures, sewn together by the Smyth machine. The left column is the needle column; the right column is the crochet hook column.

I stitched a handful of signatures, checked the tensions, and made a few more book blocks. My second-from-the-left Loop Hook needed to be adjusted. I did this by loosening the screw that holds it in place, and I stuck a tiny piece of tympan paper behind the top half of that hook, and tightened it again. That moved the hook 0.003 inch closer to the needle, allowing it to snag the thread successfully. And, with this small adjustment, I made the machine work. All six threads are being captured, all are being lifted and twisted, and all are being chain-stitched to the next signature. It’s very satisfying!

Addendum March 11, 2025: The TAGA students did have their books sewn on time! We gathered all the signatures, prepared the Smyth machine by setting the width of the books and the depth of the delivery table, and we started sewing.

Almost immediately, we had a strange mis-feed, where the front half of a signature folded up and over the previous signature, and we broke three crochet hooks. Ouch! We also bent a needle. I replaced all of these and we started again. Soon, we were sewing signatures again, and it was running quite well. We had a total run of 50 books, and we made it through the first 35 before we had to quit for the day. We will begin anew tomorrow, and we’ll finish the project.

We are applying a thin coat of bookbinder’s glue (PVA) to the spines immediately after we take them out of the machine. We found that this helps to prevent the unraveling of the chain stitches that can happen with this kind of sewing. (The Smyth machine we have included a built-in paster, which I removed; since we are not a full production shop, I didn’t want to have to deal with paste on the machine, and the clean-up after a run.) I kept all the parts in case I ever need to replace it.

I will post more after we finish the project.

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My giraffe in a jacket – more AI madness

Posted on February 12, 2025 by Brian Lawler

I’ve been experimenting with AI, and having considerable success. In previous blogs I wrote about my tremendous success with ChatGPT, with which I was able to convert printed text into editable text for a book I was trying to re-publish to get it back “in print.” Every other technique I used failed, and I had more or less given up until the AI engine helped me to succeed on that project.

This is my Giraffe in a Jacket generated by Adobe’s AI Generative Workspace. I didn’t ask for the jacket, but the AI engine persisted in providing warm jackets to all of the giraffes it created.

I found myself recently needing an image of a giraffe. I turned to Adobe’s Generative tools to get an image for this project. I needed a tall rectangular image of an entire giraffe standing. I did not want any background. I started with the following prompt:

Please render a full body image of a giraffe, standing facing the viewer, no background. The giraffe is standing in a field.

As with many of my previous experiences with AI engines (all of them), the engine mostly ignored the key points of my prompt, and rendered a shoulders-up image of a giraffe. It’s a nice image; I was partially successful.

The second image is about the same: shoulders-up, giraffe facing the viewer. But on this giraffe there is a men’s jacket! I thought this was pretty funny. Abercrombie and Giraffe?

Adobe suggests that we make successive generations of images in their workspace. I tried several times without changing the prompt.

After five tries, Adobe gave me about half a giraffe, stopping mid-body.

This is better! The jacket is gone, and I have much more of the animal.

After six tries, the Adobe engine gave me a full-body image of a giraffe, standing in a field. This set had no jackets. On the sixth iteration I got what I wanted.

Finally! I got the whole giraffe.

Where did it come up with the “idea” of a giraffe wearing a jacket? Does AI have a sense of humor? Was it being cheeky on purpose? Did some part of the AI system “think” that I wanted a giraffe wearing a nice leather jacket? A cotton jacket? A safari jacket (how ironic!)?

I played along, generating over and over, eventually getting a perfect image in the right arrangement for my project. I’m impressed.

And, I am also amused by the absurdity of my rather large collection of giraffes in safari jackets. Perhaps I should start a mail-order business to provide these nice coats to the giraffes of the world.

Here are 15 of the Ai engine’s attempts to respond to my prompt. It looks like a catalog of Giraffe jackets. The latest fashion on the savannah! I kept reminding myself that I never asked for a jacket.

I have also been experimenting with AI in Adobe’s AI and trying to determine if applying a larger color profile when opening the image in Camera Raw might increase the color volume of the images created by AI. I’ll write that blog next. Be sure to check in later for that.

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I’m holding a building permit in my hand!

Posted on October 21, 2024 by Brian Lawler

This is the latest in my posts about building a new show building. Click here to go to the beginning of the story.

After straightening out the issue of the Scenic Highway and Railroad Code, I was required to sign a host of documents sent by the county planner. These included notes about proper removal of construction waste from the property, inspection responsibilities, and acknowledgements about workers’ compensation insurance coverage. I signed, initialed, and returned the documents, and then I heard nothing for a few days.

This is not at all what a building permit looks like. They are 8.5 x 11 white paper with the words “CONSTRUCTION PERMIT” printed across the top. This one is more impressive!

When I asked about the status of the permit I received a prompt reply that my permit was approved and ready for download. Really? Seriously? I went to the County’s contractor portal, and as promised, the permit and several associated documents were there, ready for me to download. I did it quickly, paranoid that they would rescind them again, and require me to prove that my building is not visible from the Moon.

The master drawing set is now “stamped” with construction approval notices in red on every page. All of these transactions have been done digitally so far. I have not (until today) committed anything to print, which has saved me an immense amount of time, paper and ink. My drawings, and all of the drawings submitted by the various engineering firms, soils engineers, and strucural consultants, have been electronic.

The first page of the document is dated on the original application date: February 14, 2024.

Today, in honor of the approval of my application, I started printing the final drawings for the contractors to use in construction. I have 38 pages of primary drawings – structural, design, electrical, topographic, grading, and more. These are currently printing on my wide-format Epson printer. I bought two rolls of engineering paper (plain paper) to use for this. I’m printing at low resolution (720 ppi), and it’s going quite quickly.

This is my Epson printer printing pages for the contractors to use when building my new shop!

My printer software is treating it as one big job – 76 feet in length. I will have to cut the individual pages and then bind them for the builders. I will use copper grommets, set with a hammer, to hold these large (24 x 36 inch) pages along the short dimension.

This is getting exciting! I have a few tasks to complete before the grading is started. I need to revive my time-lapse camera and its weatherproof box, and then set it up on the hillside to photograph everything that happens from cutting into the hillside to erecting the building and having an open house party!

This will be fun. Stay tuned for progress reports. I’m sure it will be months before I can show you a photo of the finished building.

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