News that inkjet is now making inroads into making
electronic displays and a study into the environmental impacts of print versus
online information read off a screen have got me thinking.
Xaar’s inkjet printheads, as used in an increasing range of
digital print applications, are being used in the fabrication of LCDs.
Printed electronics is one of the much-vaunted applications
for inkjet beyond what we understand as print. In many electronics manufacturing
processes today flexo and screen printing are used, as are masking and etching
not a million miles from repro techniques of yore.
Apart from being an aside for the technologically minded why
would a printer care that the technology they use to print billboards, point of
sale, labels and the like is also being used in the manufacture of electronics?
LCDs are the screens that are slowly starting to eclipse
print in electronic billboards and appear in the aisles in shops.
With the same cost, quality and flexibility benefits that
inkjet offers to printers being used to produce screens, print’s ability to
stave off competition in some of these applications is being eroded. OK it
won’t be immediate but it’s worth contemplating how these competitive technologies
may impact our market in the medium to long term so that the appropriate
strategies to challenge or integrate them with printers’ offerings can be
developed.
Where might we challenge screens? While cost of the
infrastructure to implement displays is an issue today, it’s one that will
become less so as the cost of screens falls due to more efficient manufacturing
and higher volume production – with inkjet enabling that.
Recent research on reading newspapers online on screen
rather, using an e-book or in print published by the Royal Institute of
Technology in Stockholm, Sweden showed where the
environmental impacts were. In print the biggest impact was from the production
of the substrate with some from printing and distribution. For online the
biggest impact is the power consumed by the screen while reading. In the case of the ebook it is production of
the reader, but with the wildcard of wireless distribution of data providing a
potentially energy intensive weak link.
We need more research into how different media impact the
environment and at what stage in the process but at least this Swedish research
provides a basis to build on and to start a dialogue.
Speculating wildly it may turn out that an always on network
of wirelessly networked digital displays, however they are made, take more
energy to grab people’s attention as printing out a poster, driving it to a
site and sticking it up.
At the moment we’re only starting to ask questions about
these sorts of issues never mind find the answers. So in the meantime whether
you read in print or on screen there’s going to be acres of information you’ll
need all your energy to understand and interpret.