With drupa just months away, all eyes are on what will be new in digital print. Twenty-three years after the recognised launch of digital printing, it looks like all formats will finally be covered – including B1 digital and wide web. In the latest Print21 magazine, Andy McCourt has charted the progress of digital print since its inception and his involvement with the launch of the Indigo E-Print 1000 in 1993. He looks at what we have now and might expect to see in Düsseldorf come May 2016.
Although 1993 is widely recognised as the birth of true digital printing when Indigo and Xeikon both exhibited colour presses at the UK Ipex show; its origins go back to 1987 when Canon released the world’s first digital colour laser copier, the CLC-1. Initially a scan-to-print device only; it didn’t take long before smaller companies such as Colorbus and EFI made controllers to access the electronics and turn them into colour laser printers. Interestingly, all colour copiers in those days used Indigo-patented colour developing technology, originally invented here in Australia.
Early copiers-turned-printers didn’t excite the printing industry. They were slow (5ppm) and produced grainy results. It was not until the E-Print and Xeikon that people started to realise the potential of digital printing, rapidly followed by Xerox, Canon and a host of others. In between, the industry flirted with DI (Direct Imaging) presses which still used plates but these were imaged on-press. Although hugely popular with those who used them, the DI concept did not return sufficient profits for Heidelberg, KBA, manroland, Screen, Ryobi – even Xerox re-badged an Adast DI press and marketed it in the USA. By 2006, all offset press makers had abandoned DI as a concept; except for its inventor, Presstek who continues with it to this day.
So, what are the facts about digital today and looking forwards to drupa in Germany, in late May/early June 2016?
It looks like digital print is settling into four main production processes:
• Dry Toner
• Liquid Toner
• Inkjet
• Nanography
Nanography
Nanography is a new process and ink type developed by the inventor of Indigo, Benny Landa and his team. It is unusual in that it uses inkjet-like ejectors to form the image onto a moving belt, which then transfers the image onto the substrate. It was previewed amidst much fanfare at drupa 2012 and the S10 B1 model will be ready for commercialisation by the next drupa which opens on 31 May 2016. Indeed, Landa reports that it has doubled its exhibit area:
Ila Bialystock, Landa’s vice president, marketing, told Print21: “Landa is excited to see everyone again at drupa 2016. We have more than doubled our booth size and we will be showing the second-generation Landa S10 with the integrated cockpit. This will give everyone the opportunity to see the new Landa S10 in action. And of course, we will have plenty of other surprises.”
Unless there are surprises from other vendors, the Landa S10 could well be the only B1 size digital sheetfed press at drupa 2016, together with its development partner Komori perhaps. It is sure to draw huge crowds once more.
Inkjet
For production printing outside of wide format, inkjet has come a long way and is currently the main challenger to toner-based electro-photographic methods. Vendors who have piled into the inkjet web market include HP, Screen, Ricoh, Canon/Océ, Fuji Xerox, Fujifilm, Kodak, KBA, Miyakoshi and TKS. Sheetfed inkjet has been less spectacular in number of installations but Screen, Fujifilm, MGI and Konica Minolta all showed B2 sheetfed presses at the last drupa and Screen has one site for its Truepress Jet SX at Benefitz in Auckland.
Narrow web inkjet for labels is beginning to challenge liquid and dry toner and appears to have a bright future with models from Epson, Screen, EFI Jetrion, Stork, Durst and FFEI’s Graphium, plus numerous OEMs using Memjet’s waterfall printheads and ink. The most deployed printheads for serious production inkjet include Kyocera, Xaar, Fujifilm-Dimatix and Epson.
The scale of inkjet digital is extremely broad, with HP claiming the widest to date with a 2.8 metre machine jointly developed with KBA for the corrugated packaging sector. Kodak’s Prosper printeads are also finding their way onto web offset presses for variable data and a hybrid solution.
Liquid Toner
Once the sole domain of Indigo with its ‘ElectroInk,’ several manufacturers appear to have found a way around the patents to introduce their own presses using toner in a liquid carrier rather than dry ‘powder’. Liquid toner enables finer particle sizes and therefore higher quality results with smoother skin tones and gradations. Curiously, the technology originally came out of the same environment that enabled Indigo ElectroInk in the first place; Research Laboratories Australia in Adelaide. It’s now closed but Miyakoshi had a research program going on there for some years.
The challengers to HP Indigo’s hegemony are: Xeikon with its Trillium high-viscocity Liquid Toner press, shown in prototype at drupa 2012 and due for commercialization very soon; Canon/Océ with its InfiniStream which has one pilot European installation; Ryobi with a B2 sheetfed cmyk liquid toner machine and Miyakoshi with the 30NX-8000 B2 sheetfed and the 20NX-5000 web machine. All the web presses claim to run between 60 and 120 linear metres per minute, with the sheetfeds at between 6,000 and 8,000 B2 (788 x 600mm) sheets per hour.
HP Indigo remains light years ahead in terms of number of liquid toner (it’s not true ink by definition) installations worldwide. It will be interesting to see how successful these newer LT entrants prove to be when shown at drupa next May.
Dry toner
Electrophotographic, xerographic, electrostatic – call it what you will, but dry toner digital printing is digital market leader with ever-more advanced offerings from Xerox, Canon, Ricoh, Xeikon, Kodak, Konica Minolta, MGI, and the Heidelberg Ricoh OEM, Linoprint. Dry toner is proven, reliable and relatively cheap for both capital cost and cost-per-impression. Purists might argue that dry toner can not match liquid toner or inkjet for detail and quality but for the vast majority, the results are more than good enough with modern day toners.
Extra colours are starting to be offered with dry toner machines, such as the 5th station with Xerox’s iGen5 and the gold and silver ‘dry inks’ as options for the Color 800i and 1000i machines. Again, we find toner being called ink, which it is not. Ink is a mixture of carrier oils, resins and pigments or water and dyes in sub-micron suspensions. Ink is either applied by impression or jetted. Toner is charged particles of polymer-based colourants.
Dry toner digital printing is a long way away from losing its crown as the most used process, with a neck-and-neck race between liquid toner and inkjet to see who might one day take over. However, an ‘old dog’ dry toner may be but it is learning many new clever tricks!
Digital delivers profits
Irrespective of which digital process you choose to enter or upgrade your digital capacity to – there are arguments for all four of them – one thing is demonstrably clear. Digital printing is more profitable than conventional ‘commoditised’ offset printing. Although only about 2-3 percent of the world’s print volume is digital; between 12 and 18 percent of the dollar value is accounted for by digital, and rising (see Allison Stieven-Taylor article that follows.)
Printing is a fragmented industry, which is more of a positive than negative. The Business Dictionary defines a fragmented market as: “A marketplace where there is no one company that can exert enough influence to move the industry in a particular direction. The market consists of several small to medium-sized companies that compete with each other and large enterprises.”
Yes, we have our PMP, IPMG, Franklin Web, Webstar and AIWs but they are specialists in high volume, mostly web printing and hardly likely to impact on the average 5-20 employee fragmented SME print shop. Geon tried that and look where it got them.
Digital printing supports the fragmentation of printing and has lower entry barriers. While the brouhaha surrounding it might be disproportionate to its position in the global industry; it is outpacing offset, flexo and gravure in growth and is delivering superior profit performance for printer and equipment vendor alike. 21