Canon fires broadside at digital printing’s ‘Big Berthas’ – news commentary by Andy McCourt

Canon Australia treated the media to a day out visiting customers and internal facilities last week and Steven Brown, market segment manager, (pictured on left with Sam Carter, Kinko’s National Operations Manager) was unequivocal about positioning Canon’s lower-speed copier/printers against what he terms ‘Big Berthas’ – the likes of Xerox 6135s for mono and iGen3 and HP Indigo 3050 for colour.

Canon’s B&W offering is the Image Runner 105, which as the name implies a 105-A4 page-per-minute copier/printer. This positions it against the Xerox Nuvera 100. Canon backs up its claim that two, three or more iR105s are a better proposition than a single 135ppm or 180ppm ‘Big Bertha.’ Brown points out that Kinko’s and Pirion – the two Sydney CBD printers visited as part of the Canon media event – have chosen this route because of flexibility and business continuity in the event of one machine going down.

Pirion’s David Weaver said he was impressed with the flexibility provided by multiple Canon 105s in his 24-hours a day, five days a week operation. Pirion is the digital division of Canberra’s Pirie Printers, 50 per cent owned by JS McMillan. “If one machine goes down, we’re still in business,” he noted, adding that each machine is printing about 600,000 A4 mono pages per month, just 200,000 short of the duty cycle. Xerox’s Nuvera clocks in at 3 million A4/month duty cycle.

Likewise the ‘cluster’ approach using slower mono printers suits Kinko’s National Operations Manager Sam Carter who is running three of them in his central Sydney store and others around the FedEx-owned Kinko’s group.

Commenting on the notion that several smaller digital printers are better than one leviathan, Rapid Digital’s Ron Anderson, owner of Australia’s first Fuji Xerox iGen3 said: “Big or small, you need two of them. Unlike offset presses, digital printers require a lot of maintenance. Break down and you have to have a backup.”

However, he does not see Fuji Xerox’s position at the high volume end as under threat and has announced plans to add two more iGen3s to his Artarmon, NSW site, and upgrade them to 300ppm when Xerox makes this available. This will make Rapid Digital the largest all - digital printer in the Southern Hemisphere.

(Rapid Digital is opening its state of the art facility next Tuesday in North Sydney – contact ron@rapidrepro.com.au if you want to get along.

Canon is big, very big

Canon’s worldwide 2003 sales of US$29.9 billion comprises $21.25 billion from ‘business machines’ making it larger than Xerox, at US$15.7 billion, in this sector. However, Xerox is not as active in the lower-end ‘MFD’ and desktop inkjet market preferring to focus on the office and higher volume production environments. This appears to be where Canon intends to draw the battle lines, saying that shorter runs and more frequent job changes will favour the ‘pocket rocket’ printers over the ‘big berthas,’ even to the point that the big digital guns will disappear.

At its CISRA research facility, Canon showed the latest developments in MEAP (Multifunction Embedded Application Platform), released in 2003. This turns mid-level print/copiers into intelligent ‘terminals’ capable of connecting to networks, databases and MIS to deliver two-way functionality, such as printing a business form stored on its hard disk and accepting the completed form back through its scanner to the call centre or admin office.

Where finishing is concerned, Canon’s approach is more towards off-line finishing on dedicated equipment rather than inline ‘sheet to bound book’ configurations, although it does offer a booklet maker with the 105.

On finishing, Anderson agrees with Canon, “Offline finishing is a far better option. One of the biggest mistakes I ever made was putting a $120,000 booklet maker on one Docutech when offline I could feed it from five Docutechs.”


MY CALL

It’s a classic ‘horses for courses’ argument. There is certainly a place for clusters of 100ppm mono machines in the document market where diverse customers place regular and short run orders. Ricoh and Océ also have 105ppm mono offerings, looking very much like the Canon. There’s no point having a 3 million duty cycle machine if your business is only producing 500,000 A4 sheets a month.

Printers and inplants with longer runs and higher duty-cycle demands will still mostly stick with the big guns for mono and, when it comes to volume colour, it’s a no-contest. Now that digital has broken the 130ppm barrier, it can compete with offset but needs to keep TCO (Total Cost of Operation) under control. The bigger, more automated machines can cope with the juicy big orders as well as the “onsies-and-twosies” and the labour required to make them work is less than a fleet of smaller machines.

The comparison is to be found in the offset world. Twenty-metre long eight and ten-colour perfecting B1 presses have sold very well, as have mega-format heatset webs. These are the ‘big offset berthas,’ and they are being kept very busy right now. It would be a hard call to suggest five 4c B2 presses could knock off a Heidelberg SM102 10P (5/5) for the 20,000 run magazine jobs. However, the B2 presses are great for the repeat 2,000+ A3 brochure customer.

It’s important to segment B&W from colour with digital printing. HP Indigo operates only in colour, for instance. B&W is still growing but colour is growing at a much faster rate. Fuji Xerox now derives 20 per cent of its revenue from colour products but they account for only 4per cent of the pages produced on Xerox technology. That can only mean that colour is five time more profitable, for the equipment vendor at least.

So colour is where the big battles will be fought in the digital future. Canon has excellent offerings in the 30-50 ppm sector but it’s crowded there with Ricoh, Océ, Konica-Minolta, HP, Sharp, Toshiba and others. It’s a big step up to 80, 100, 130 and more ppm in full colour and the likes of Fuji Xerox, HP Indigo, NexPress and Xeikon have this to themselves so far. However, expect faster colour machines from Canon by PacPrint.

The digital colour production market is segmented – even fragmented – and bullish at the moment. It will remain that way for some years. There’s room for everyone in both the ‘office’ and ‘production’ areas. The crunch will come when saturation is reached and sales slow.

Analyse your real-world customer requirements for both B&W and colour, allow a percentage for growth and invest in digital press productivity to match your business plan.


What’s Your Call? Come back to Andy at andy@mccourtconsult.com.au