Samworth Inducted into FTA's Hall of Fame

INDIANAPOLIS, Ind.—Mark Samworth, vice president of technology for EskoArtwork, is the 49th inductee into FTA’s Hall of Fame. He is a color scientist, who in the late 1970s stepped out of the traditional printing mindset and linked print outcomes with computer science.

At the time, few recognized that such insight would prove paramount to the advancement of an industry. Color management was yet to become a principle, but in the ensuing 30 years, Samworth became widely recognized as one of its founding fathers and its leading proponent in the world of flexography. DuPont’s Mark Mazur says of his colleague, “Color and curves have made Mark’s career.”

Samworth focuses on teaching people to do better flexo printing. He has traveled the country and the world calibrating scanners for flexo, presenting seminars on print reproduction, digital plate optimization, color management and expanded color gamut printing. His processes and procedures have been patented many times over. The names and techniques are familiar to many FTA members.

Intro to FTA

Long-time friend, Herb Schwart, general manager at Bizerba Label Solutions, Inc., in Forest Hill, Md., recalls Samworth’s early involvement in FTA. “While at RIT, the 1982 FTA Forum was held in Toronto, only about a three-hour drive from Rochester. Four students hit the road, including Mark. They had a chance to experience the industry in a whole different way by attending informative and exciting presentations about the advancements of flexo by day, and hobnobbing with the executives by night in the hospitality suites,” he says. “Those executives seemed, surprisingly, very welcoming of a few young students interested in a career in flexo.”

From that day forward, Forum has been a part of Samworth’s professional life. He took to the podium for the first time in 1995 in Orlando, where he challenged the industry to rethink the way it views and defines color to meet the present and future needs for standardization of color space. “If direct-to-plate is to be successful, an essential ingredient is the capability to equate computer color to proofing color to press color,” he noted. Samworth remains a fixture on stage, having given 17 presentations on flexography.

Samworth spent the early years of his career, from 1985 to 1997, with DuPont, where he held numerous positions in the areas of flexographic plates and electronic imaging. From there, he moved on to PCC Professional Computing Corp. That firm evolved into Artwork Systems and eventually merged with Esko to form present-day EskoArtwork.

Passions and pursuits

Screening, calibration, color management and digital imaging technology have been Samworth’s passions—FlexoCal, Hybrid Screening, Plate Cell Patterning, Concentric Screening, PressSync and Equinox 7 color process color—his creations. He has devised patented methods for assigning prepress curves, user-adjustable gamut-mapping techniques, edge mask technology, and improving solid retention in flexographic printing plates. Many say his work speaks to his advocacy for changing rules whenever and wherever necessary to make things print more smoothly and consistently.

For example, he once said, “For the same reasons that anilox rolls contain cells, solid areas of flexographic printing plates should also contain cells. These plate cells promise to play a crucial role in the future of flexography. Cells in the plates significantly reduce the need for excessive ink and printing impression, and hence provide for a system more conducive to optimum print quality. It was the quest to determine the best dot shapes, angles and rulings for screening solids that ultimately led to the development of plate cell patterns.”

Credited with being imaginative, Samworth’s own words define him as a realist at heart. For example, in May 2001, he stated, “A print test is not an acid test—where the paper either turns purple or not. It is subjective. Differences are often more related to how different printers do work, than they are to the mechanics of the process.”