Kodak, Canon extend alliance

Kodak and Canon are broadening their long-standing alliance with the launch of the Kodak Nexpress M700 Digital Colour Press for the US and Canada market, reports Huliq.com.

The new digital colour press serves as an extension of a Drupa 2004 exhibition announcement to collaborate across a broad range of digital printing technologies and market development opportunities.

Kodak and Canon have successfully collaborated in the black-and-white digital production printing arena since 1999.

HP says advances in printer technology mean short run colour jobs are no longer prohibitively expensive, reports ITPro.

Guy Thompson, HP`s product manager of workflow services, says as digital colour printing gets cheaper, more and more uses are found, like printing on demand or personalising brochures.

"In the past, the more you printed, the lower each cost," he said. "Now you print what you need." HP says it has used on-demand printing to save £200 million a year on its own brochures, while still being able to personalise them.

Echo One has released DoubleTake 2.1 for Mac OS X 10.4, says PRMac.com.

The company says DoubleTake is for stitching photos, screen shots and scans to larger images.

Poster printing is now an added feature, and DoubleTake splits the photo and prints it on pages ready to be cut and pasted into a poster. Poster printing will let users set the size of the finished poster directly, or fill a number of pages to the edges.