From Invisible Inks to Baseball Bats: The World of UV Printing with Lon Riley, DPI Laboratory

Step into the world of UV printing with Lon Riley, founder of DPI Laboratory, as he reveals how this rapidly evolving technology is transforming personalization across industries. Unlike traditional printing methods, UV printing instantly cures ink with ultraviolet light, making products immediately ready for handling or shipping—a game-changer for on-demand production.

What began as a specialty ink company has evolved into a full-service printing solution provider, with DPI Laboratory now offering two printer models tailored to different market needs. The compact Catalyst Nanos delivers professional-grade UV printing at an accessible price point for small businesses, while the larger Catalyst Aventra, with its triple printhead configuration, satisfies high-volume production demands with sophisticated white ink and varnish capabilities.

The true magic of UV printing lies in its remarkable versatility. Photographers can expand beyond traditional prints to offer images on virtually any surface. Promotional product businesses can deliver everything from personalized golf balls to custom tumblers. Event venues can even bring printers on-site for real-time merchandise customization. As Riley explains, "You can produce a very high-quality photo at two feet by three feet, or you can put a face on a Lego minifigure."

From sports memorabilia with game dates and scores to concert merchandise created on demand, consumers increasingly seek personalized products that transform branded items into meaningful keepsakes. With exceptional print quality, improved durability, and sophisticated workflow integration, UV printing is positioned to meet this demand while opening new revenue streams for businesses across multiple industries.

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Chapters

• 14:09 [Ad] PodMatch
• 14:48 (Cont.) From Invisible Inks to Baseball Bats: The World of UV Printing with Lon Riley, DPI Laboratory

Transcript

Erin Manning: 0:02

Welcome to the Dead Pixel Society podcast, the photo imaging industry's leading news source. Here's your host, Gary Pageau. The Dead Pixels Society podcast is brought to you by Mediaclip, Advertek Printing and Independent Photo Imagers.

Gary Pageau: 0:18

Hello again and welcome to the Dead Pixels Society podcast. I'm your host, Gary Pageau, and today we're joined by Lon Riley, who's the founder of DPI Laboratory, and he's coming to us from St Petersburg, Florida, today. Hey Lon, how are you today?

Lon Riley: 0:31

Hey, Gary, I'm doing. Great Thanks for having me. I appreciate it.

Gary Pageau: 0:33

So you're a relatively new company in the UV printing space. So for the people who don't know what UV printing is, let's start there and how you got the company started.

Lon Riley: 0:45

Sure, UV printing is basically a form of printing that uses a UV curable ink. So when the people that are familiar with inks that normally have to air dry or water-based inks, the difference is when the UV ink jets on a surface, the UV light immediately goes over, it cross-links the monomers and it cures immediately. So once you uh jet onto a substrate it's immediately ready to use package send. So it's a relatively newer technology. It's been around for some years. Uh continued to advance over the last four or five years, gained a lot of traction and uh. You know markets such as signage, uh, promotional products, of course, award and trophy uh and photography crowd.

Gary Pageau: 1:28

Yeah, and that's kind of what I want to talk about a little bit, because you've got some printers coming out and we'll talk about that later. But you know how long has the company been around? What is the technical foundation? What is your kind of your unique value that you're bringing to the market?

Lon Riley: 1:39

We started the company early last year really based around the uv inks and coatings. So we do some specialty coatings. They're uv cured for larger print bar applications, manufacturing and package type applications, do embellishment and special techniques, gloss coats and things like that. That's where we started. After we kind of ran the trade show circuit last year, had a number of former vendors, former partners, approach us about doing a UV line. We started looking at it and found some gaps in the industry and we thought there was a good place in the industry for a really well-built machine that's at a lower price point than you typically see but packaged with top software and then, of course, with our inks that we formulate here as well.

Lon Riley: 2:24

So a good opportunity to put together an all-inclusive package that would create a lot of value, give customers a lot of those features that you normally would only see reserved for much larger, more expensive machines, but in something that's more approachable here for the SMB market.

Gary Pageau: 2:40

So you started really on. The supply side is the inks and do you formulate your own? Is that your own, like formulations that you've got?

Lon Riley: 2:48

It is we work with a manufacturer, of course. So we do a lot of work with the manufacturer with specific things Like we've recently released a security ink, so it's a basically like a fluorescent component to a gloss, so you can jet it on anything and it's relatively invisible until you shine a black light on it. So it's used for things like. We have a number of customers that are in the promotional product space. They do things like Christmas ornaments. They were using black QR codes to label their products and now they're able to basically put that product stamp on invisibly. But they can still get the benefit of the automation from their QR systems, but they don't have that big old black QR code hanging out anymore.

Gary Pageau: 3:32

Okay, so it's more pleasing and the appearance is better.

Lon Riley: 3:37

Agreed and a little bit. It's more pleasing appearance and it still fits right into their production lines.

Gary Pageau: 3:45

So who do you say are the traditional customers that you've been working with for this? You said like sign shops, things like that, Because I want to get into later on kind of the photographic applications but who do you see as the main people using UV printing?

Lon Riley: 4:00

technology right now. Probably the most common, and which has been for many years, is promotional products and corporate gifting. Yeah, I tell people that when people ask what do your printers do, I say that well, they're basically kind of like the inkjet printer you probably have sitting next to you on your desk, except the head raises up a good bit so you can fit, you know, any any number of things underneath it phone cases, cups and tumblers and things like that. So promotional products and corporate gifting are really probably the staple of the industry. You could brand USB speakers and phone cases and things like that.

Gary Pageau: 4:34

Yeah, I always go with the golf balls. I said you can put a face on a golf ball.

Lon Riley: 4:39

The golf balls are probably the standard. Those are the old school standard and they're still gigantically popular. We get interest in golf balls almost daily.

Gary Pageau: 4:49

So where I've seen the crossover with what I would call the photographic market because it's all kind of coming together in kind of this mass you had the photo labs who were traditionally photographic in the sense that they were using photographic chemicals and all that, and a lot of them added inkjet, they've added dye, sub, they've a lot of them gotten into the UV space for exactly that purpose. Right, they're working with images. Some of their corporate customers now want promotional products. Are you seeing a lot of that crossover as well?

Lon Riley: 5:21

We are, and the great thing about the UV technology is that it's so versatile that you can take one of those high quality photos and you can put it on products and you can productize it so you can turn, you convert it to a key chain, you can convert it to a Tumblr, but you can still also run it out on very, very high quality photo paper or canvas or on a product such as photo text, which is kind of a really nice quality peel and stick reusable wallpaper.

Lon Riley: 5:48

So you can do those things. You can build murals by stitching them, stitching your photos together into pieces. It's so flexible. That's why I think we've seen a lot of adoption in that space, because you can still do the traditional things that you normally would, but you can also extend the product lines into a lot of new areas.

Gary Pageau: 6:07

Are there any environmental differences working with UV materials as opposed to traditional inkjet or other digital materials, or is it about the same?

Lon Riley: 6:16

I'd say it's relatively similar. I mean, the inks are low VOC so they don't have a real heavy heavy smell to them or anything like that. And it's inkjet technology, so it is a linear inkjet technology. We've settled on Epson heads. We use Epson technology in our printers, has been a standard in so many industries for so long and we just find it makes such an incredible quality print.

Gary Pageau: 6:41

Sure, sure. You started on the supply space, but now you're. You come out with your own printers. When did that revelation come into play? That, oh my gosh, you know there's a space in the market? What was that space in the market that you saw?

Lon Riley: 6:53

It was the middle of last year and it really started with some of the tangential industries. For example, I was approached by a company that's in the garment space and the premise was, you know, a lot of the companies that are in the garment space really were relatively unaware of the UV. So we felt like we had two, really two ways to expand the market and the UV market continues to grow. But one was in established markets that use very similar processes and very similar technology and there's an awareness gap. They're just unaware that they can extend their current product lines with this new technology. On the other side, we did feel like there was a special place in the market in that, you know, 10 to $45,000 range, where there were not a lot of companies playing in that area and you know the options were kind of larger, very heavily engineered, very expensive machines or, on the low end, traditional companies that operate with traditional printing technology.

Gary Pageau: 8:10

You know you mentioned the garment thing because I that that is also a big of interest to people. But again you mentioned, you know, garment printers are kind of very specific, right. They're very like. That's all you can do with them is like a UV printer similar to yours, an option for somebody who may not do a lot of garments and maybe they but they want to throw in a few shirts. Is that sort of the idea behind it.

Lon Riley: 8:34

We don't normally do wearable apparel. The UV, water-based inks perform so much better and they feel so much better. We do use UV on fabrics, though, so for things like backpacks or canvas bags, things like that, so there is a textile hook to it. We don't typically recommend it personally for wearable garments, but it is very similar. The inks are different, but the techniques are similar. When I train people on the UV printing, I normally tell them it's really a two-step process. It's getting the object onto the printer in the right place and then getting the art onto the object in the right place, and it's effectively the same thing that the garment folks are already doing. The software is very similar, the process is very similar, so it's a natural fit into those environments.

Gary Pageau: 9:22

Because the interesting thing is, I always hear about, you know, garments the next big thing. And then when you talk to the software people, the people like who are doing the templates and the arrangements, they're saying wait, it's way more difficult than you think you know, because it's got to look right, while it's not flat wrapped around a person, right For printing an entire shirt. So it's a lot more different than, let's say, like you said, just an image on a backpack or something like that. It's a lot more complex, but we want it to look good.

Lon Riley: 9:48

There is a lot that goes into it, yes, especially when you get into the ink chemistries, the color, the different fabrics and things like that. Yeah, it's a very similar process, the inkjet technology normally. You see also direct-to-garment, which is a similar inkjet technology that's been, you know, very popular for some years, and recently you've seen a lot of, a lot of shift into DTF, which is the direct film transfer technique.

Gary Pageau: 10:13

So you're seeing a lot of that today as well. So tell us a little bit about your two products, because you got, you know. I mean, I've seen pictures. I haven't actually seen them in person, but I've seen pictures of the products. They're very different, you know, whereas usually it seems to me in the printer world there's always like the, the got the, the base model and then the slightly faster model, and then the slightly faster model, with some finishing options on the backend, but there's really not much difference between them. But I think your two printers are actually like two very distinct products.

Lon Riley: 10:44

They are two distinct products. I mean they operate similarly, they function similarly, we use the same software. So we try to make it easy for customers that maybe begin with a smaller printer to then graduate to the larger printer without a lot of learning curve for their operators and teams or companies that we have that actually use both. So we have two models. The smaller version is the Catalyst Nanos and that's got a roughly 11 by 17 inch bed single Epson printhead, and it's a smaller printer designed for the SMB market. But we also have seen a lot of adoption and manufacturing, rapid prototyping, people that need to produce one-off prints and things like that, concept pieces. So we've got it, you know, very reasonably priced with a lot of features like bulk ink systems we're able to bring the ink costs down for customers and some built-in safety features as well Anti-collision bars and things like that that normally you don't see in printers that size.

Lon Riley: 11:38

We also that one also offers a rotary and a roll-based system so you could print rolls of wallpaper, you could print a rotary tumbler, full wrap, and you can also do DTF with it UV DTF, so transfer film for, for example, coffee mugs or something that you would have a handle. You wouldn't normally be able to rotate all the way around. And then the bigger system is the Catalyst Avent ventra that's got a roughly 24 by 36 inch bed. So for much larger objects or much larger quantities of objects, that one can print quite a few golf balls at a time. It'll really rip them out too. But you know we did some things that that one's got three heads in it. So the typical configuration will have a white head, a color head and then a varnish head. So we can do, um, your white under base normalized colors. You know varnish techniques, things like that.

Erin Manning: 12:29

Yeah.

Lon Riley: 12:31

And then it's substantially faster with the three staggered heads.

Gary Pageau: 12:36

So do you think people will be running these side by side or starting with the Nano and moving up? I'm just trying to figure out you know kind of where you see these position in the market. You said you know the Nano is more of the SMB and the other one is more of a production device. Do you think people have both in some places?

Lon Riley: 12:56

In some places, yes, and it always surprises me. Like anything else in life, you go into the conversation with a customer expecting one thing and then you end up with the other thing. So a lot of times too, I've talked to Fortune 500 companies that we were all in on the Aventra, and as soon as they saw the Nanos, they preferred to go that route. For, you know, because they were working on certain, certain methodologies and concepts where that smaller printer, multiplied in shorter runs, was better for their production environment than actually one bigger, much faster printer. It just, it's just. It happened to suit their need and it was a surprising shift, but we're happy to accommodate so you know you mentioned cylindrical thing here earlier.

Gary Pageau: 13:39

Um, at the recent, you know, photo imaging connect conference we had recently they were talking about how drink wearing mugs are probably one of the biggest categories still with all in personalized products, at least in the photographic space. That that is like the number one thing. And when I was at Printing United last year I saw a lot of dedicated cylindrically printed devices. You know that were just. They were just rotating water bottles over and over and over again. Why do you think that is? I mean, I'm just curious. You know you've been in the market for a while. Why do you think drinkware is such a big product for personalized imaging?

Lon Riley: 14:46

It seems that everybody's carrying some sort of drinkware with them, whether it's water or coffee or depending on, maybe later in the day, maybe something else. But you know, somebody seems to always have a giant cup with them these days and being able to add that level of personalization or something that you know gives them a little bit of a connection to it, I think just lends a lot to it. It's, it's been probably the most popular area for photographers, but also for monograms crafters. I mean, it's, it's, it's been a. I've seen companies that have, like you said, 40 and 50 machines just rotating cups all day long, and the larger cylindrical machines that are dedicated, that's all they do. You know it's, it's, it's continues to be a popular genre, so of course we accommodate it.

Lon Riley: 15:34

You know the the difference between. You know the bigger cylindrical machines are normally faster on a one-up basis, but they're also very, very, very expensive. Right, and you know to to the degree that you could potentially put in two or three flatbed machines with a rotary attachment for the same price provides redundancy, and when you start printing two and three at a time, all of a sudden on a per unit basis, you're a little bit faster. So we've stuck with the flatbed model with the rotary attachment, and we feel like it just gives customers the option that they can do the drinkware and if the trends shift in the future years, they can shift to something else relatively easily.

Gary Pageau: 16:12

Yeah, well, that is part of. The thing is, with a unit like this, is the flexibility that you're not committing to one specific size or dimension of a printed object or dimension of a of a printed object.

Lon Riley: 16:23

True, I we've with, and with this rotary as well, we've actually printed. We've printed a full wrap on a major league baseball bat barrel because it's the printer bed is wide enough to accommodate a 33 inch major league bat, so we were able to put it's a, it's a, it's a neat little video we did and put out, put a full wrap of flames on a major league bat barrel, kind of fun.

Gary Pageau: 16:43

So, speaking of like sports entertainment, I you know, I saw on your website you've done, you've done some articles on that. That's really kind of where a lot of these items are taking off, isn't it?

Lon Riley: 17:03

It is.

Lon Riley: 17:03

And sports entertainment you know we try to treat that as a niche and it's completely the opposite of that because it's so gigantic when you look at all the things that you could possibly do Right From you know, tournaments, sporting goods, sporting goods manufacturers, the traditional, as you said, golf ball customization, baseball customization into really driving fan engagement, right into really driving fan engagement.

Lon Riley: 17:24

The great thing about this technology is it is you can do large run or you can do short run, but you can basically do it on demand.

Lon Riley: 17:30

So for a lot of companies that have, or even teams you know a lot of the ball teams, minor league ball teams they plan their promotions out months in advance, they order in quantities but when it comes down to it, you don't know who's in the playoffs until maybe Tuesday for a Saturday game. So you know this kind of technology allows them to. You know, all of a sudden I can rip out rally towels and have them sitting on the seat in the stadium on Saturday once I know which teams are in, and so you can have that kind of flexibility with promotions that drive fan engagement. So we feel like it's a great opportunity and it's fun. I mean, we love working with the sports stuff and there's really nothing better than somebody coming in and going man, I didn't know you could do that. So yeah, we'll give it a go and see what we can do with it in and going man, I didn't know you could do that.

Gary Pageau: 18:15

So yeah, we'll give it a go and see what we can do with it, because I think this whole overall personalization quick, you know, production set of one or design of one, I guess in a short time is really what's driving a lot of the market. You know, seeing a lot of the bigger printers starting to get more and more involved in this market. Do you think that's a technology thing or a cultural thing? Because think it's. I think it's a little bit of both. You know there used to be, you know, when I was growing up, if I wanted a detroit tigers baseball because I'm from michigan, you know it would just be a. You know detroit tigers baseball with maybe a I don't even know what the technology was at the time but just basically the logo on, you know, a d on a ball. Nowadays you can get that same ball, but it's going to be personalized with, you know, the day you were at the game and maybe the score, whatever. So what do you think is driving that?

Lon Riley: 19:02

I mean, I think you're right. It is that it's both sides of that. And you know selfishly you know my name is Lon L-O-N. When you go to the ballpark and you see all the baseballs and they've got Kevin and Mike and John there was never a lawn right, there was always baseball. That's what I ended up with was baseball fan with the logo on this. Get the Gary mug there.

Lon Riley: 19:25

So I didn't have that option. So I can place an order, put basically anything I want on it and workflow it. And to. The advancements in the workflow are something that we work with too, because we work with a lot of companies that are doing print-on-demand businesses. So they'll take orders online, they'll be able to workflow them directly to the printers and then we can use our software to almost like a variable data type product. We can put all those names out, put them in order, match them to the order codes and then, once the printers run, take them off and scan them and ship them out to the customer. So you know the time to delivery has gotten so short. It's the Amazon effect, you know. Sure Nobody wants to wait five days. When they can prime it It'll be there this afternoon. Sure, absolutely. You've seen a lot of that as this technology continues to advance and get fast, you've got a lot of that that effect there.

Gary Pageau: 20:13

I was thinking, though, culturally though, people want to have themselves on there, where I don't think that was always the case, right, where you know the, the, the brand was like what you wanted to aspire to, and now you have people want to put their own twist on the brand by adding their own content to it.

Lon Riley: 20:29

It's content culture. Yeah, everybody wants to be a star. Be a star on YouTube or on your own mug in your car. It makes it easy. But, yeah, I think especially to it. Does the short run ability, especially in this creator culture where people are their own brands? I mean, get back to the sports with NIL.

Lon Riley: 20:49

I mean all the athletes are now a brand you know so everybody has the ability to create that own brand now a brand you know. So everybody has the ability to create that own brand and, with the technology being accessible, being relatively inexpensive, you can a B test those things. You can see what people are interested in. You don't have to make a hundred thousand dollar investment in a theory to find out. Nobody cares, right. So it's that's. That's one of the benefits of the short run technology as well.

Gary Pageau: 21:15

You know it's interesting is that because one of the markets I cover is the volume photography market, which you know schools and things like that and then they also do a lot of sports and dance and cheer and you know those kind of things, and I've discovered I've been out of touch, obviously, from high school for a while, but now high schools have media days for their athletes and there's merch for that. That is specific for the athletes. It's amazing and that's where all this comes into play.

Lon Riley: 21:42

It's amazing. I mean, you'll see there's, there's agent work now going down sub high school.

Gary Pageau: 21:48

You know that's a little creepy to me.

Lon Riley: 21:51

It is kind of crazy. I just had a conversation with that, with one of the sports communities that I'm involved with. We were talking about this last night and again it's that pro experience. You know, as a little kid man, all I wanted to do was nail that walk-off homer. You know, for the pros, Obviously, that ship has sailed and now I make printers.

Gary Pageau: 22:08

I don't know. There's always time.

Lon Riley: 22:10

There's always time my phone is on. You know when. The Yankees may be leaving me a message right now as we speak, but chances are I'll be making printers again tomorrow. But I mean, everybody wanted that experience, you know, and now you can. You can get that experience. You got the media days, the clubhouse, the products with the kids on it. You know there's a product that I saw the other day where they actually have announcers that will you upload a clip and they will call your kids play. I mean you know that pro experience that people are looking for and having your image on something like a baseball card is part of it.

Gary Pageau: 22:44

Yeah, it's well, you know what it's it's. It's definitely something that you know is a great opportunity for a lot of people. Do you think there's going to be a point there where there's going to be saturation in the market for this, or is it just still blue skies for this stuff?

Lon Riley: 23:01

I think there will be and you know it's the next technology is always around the corner. I do think right now we got a lot of runway left, though, with space, because just the diversity of applications that you know, even the most rudimentary, boring thing ever is we print asset tags on modems. Okay, we, and we do that all day, every day, and there's nothing fancy about it. It's asset tag to the most kind of creative stuff. You could think of the rotaries on bats and you know, sports gear and things that you want to do or print on demand and really even event-based, which, as the like most things, as the technology continues to shrink. That's another reason we wanted to have a smaller printer. So, with the Nanos, you know, that's something that we've had a lot of interest in event-based People that actually bring the printer to a location and be able to print on demand right there.

Gary Pageau: 23:52

So to your point. Yeah, thinking you mentioned like minor league baseball, right, I mean, somebody could drop one of those things in their fan shop and, you know, have a personalized baseball with the, you know lansing lug nuts, for example. That was the team I was closest to, was, and again, it's that opportunity. Whereas you know there are ways, there are ways to do that, you know, with other technology, but I don't think it had the quality that I think UV printing does. I think that's the big differential is you're not sacrificing quality with this kind of thing.

Lon Riley: 24:24

It's a huge differential. It really is, because you could produce a very, very high quality photo quality print at two feet by three feet. Or you can put a face on a Lego minifigure. You know, we the other day we were actually testing tiny images on marbles. We were printing on marbles for a customer that is getting a sports promotion, and so it's fun. You can get an amazing detail and even the smallest little pieces. So the quality is a differentiator. And then really the ability to integrate that workflow software, so like you're talking about, like a fan shop you know, driving fan engagement being able to integrate that technology with, even perhaps like an app, so as people are sitting there in the game and they're interacting with the game exactly ends and they're interacting with the app.

Lon Riley: 25:09

They can order product and pick it up on the way out of the stadium, right notification, and so there's. That's why I think there is a lot of blue sky with it, in terms of not just what it can do, but how it can interact and weave into other technologies and how people kind of roll it into other things that they're doing. It can become a part of so many other things.

Gary Pageau: 25:33

Yeah, because part of it is. You know they're trying to maximize the potential within the audience, right? If you work hard to get someone to a sporting event, to get them to a concert, to get something to something like that, you know you've got to maximize. These days, you know that economic potential, whether you know so, personalized products is definitely a way to do it, especially on site. I think concerts is a great idea, for example.

Lon Riley: 25:59

It is Concerts is great, yeah, and then you know it gives it it also it's. It's a way to keep that experience and keep that brand in front of the customer when they leave as well. You know we were. I was talking to a company the other day and we were working on a promotional item for a, a concert slash, sporting goods kind of application, and they said, well, durability is not that important because this is really kind of a single use item.

Lon Riley: 26:21

You know and durability is really not that important. I said durability is always important and that's because you know. I mean you don't want them to go home and have the print peeling off and throw the object away. You want them to take that object and put it in their cabinet and every time they pull it back out of the cabinet they remember that experience, they remember the feeling and they want to come back and do it again and so it's all right.

Gary Pageau: 26:41

Yeah, I guess durability is kind of Well, yeah, because I mean that is one of the things is you know you got to go with. I mean, everyone's had park from 20 years ago and it's just, you know, just awful. Like you said, it's fading, it's falling apart and today you don't have that. You can have both, actually. You can have speed and quality.

Lon Riley: 27:02

You can speed, quality, durability, I mean they're accessible. And you know, as the print technologies improve, so is the ink chemistry. So that's one of those things we're trying to improve all three that the speed and quality of the machines, the chemistry, and then the software that weaves it all together so you get those color, those accurate color matches and things like that bigger companies demand so on the software piece, you know how well does it fit into like routing workflow in in businesses, like, for example, if you had multiple devices printing different things?

Gary Pageau: 27:34

can you, is it easy to route, or is it a dedicated thing where you have to download the image into those software and print it from there? Is it networkable, I guess is my question.

Lon Riley: 27:43

We have a workflow software that underlies the core RIP. So the RIP software is what we use, that comes with the printer and that just allows you to take your art, make the prints, manipulate the art. It's very sophisticated RIP, but we also have an underlying workflow software that does allow you to pull orders in from an online presence, integrate them into your workflow and then distribute that workflow. So if you had three or four machines, you know, for example, if one machine were down although that doesn't happen, should never happen, or for some reason to happen you could actually turn it off and reroute your jobs to another machine and then keep the workflow moving and or dedicate machines to specific functions. Okay, so you know, we have some customers that run a white color varnish configuration. We have some that run a different configuration, a different order, because they might be doing a reverse print on acrylic or things like that. So, based on the product and based on the layering, you could route those different parts to different printers and have them get to the right location.

Gary Pageau: 28:38

And that's all bundled into that, the pricing, the software.

Lon Riley: 28:42

That workflow piece is a different. That's a different.

Gary Pageau: 28:45

Oh, the workflow piece is different, but the RIP software comes with it.

Lon Riley: 28:48

It accommodates that the RIP software comes with the printers and that would accommodate the workflow pieces in the back. And we use a system called and we know we also. That does include a more rudimentary system. I say rudimentary but it does include a simpler system that uses hot folders. So you know, really anybody with this core RIP software could really just port jobs into hot folders on a server or anywhere else any central data location, and the RIP would then pick those up. We can do it the more sophisticated way with a really heavy duty backend workflow, qr integrated and things like that. Or you can just generally route traffic through basic server folders and get a similar function using our software.

Gary Pageau: 29:27

Yeah, because I'm thinking that probably more suitable for the on-site application, for example.

Lon Riley: 29:32

It would be. And when it comes to workflow and enterprise workflow there's you've got to find the right customer in the right place in the growth curve for that. Companies that are too small are not going to want to make that investment. The ones that are very large have already made it and the switching costs can be high.

Gary Pageau: 29:54

Catching the falling knife.

Lon Riley: 29:56

Right, there you go.

Gary Pageau: 29:57

So where can people go for more information about DPI Laboratories?

Lon Riley: 30:03

The website is a great start. It's dpi-labcom and there we have information on a little bit of information the workflow system software, mostly work information around the printers and then our inks and coatings. You can also call us at 727-210-5478. And that's the direct line and you can get through to our sales or support team there as well.

Gary Pageau: 30:24

Awesome. Well, thank you, alan, it's great to talk to you. I really like talking about kind of this, the opportunities for newer technologies, especially in the photo space, because it's all kind of coming together into one big opportunity right now.

Lon Riley: 30:37

I love these conversations, Gary. Thank you so much. I appreciate it.

Erin Manning: 30:41

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