The printing industry is facing a veritable tsunami of inkjet at the major trade show in May/June as manufacturers jostle to find space in the market for what is becoming to be recognised as ‘the future of printing.’
Two and a half days of presentations at the drupa media conference centre in Düsseldorf this week leaves no doubt that the industry is shifting rapidly towards the ‘contactless’ printing technology of the future. Despite the huge imbalance between analogue and digital actual production, with one figure quoting a total printing market of 5 trillion images of which only two percent are produced digitally, the clear shift is towards digital, almost across the board.
Company after company fronted the graphic arts press corps Messe Düsseldorf this week to announce their move into inkjet or an upgrade to their existing offering. Combined with Heidelberg’s announcement the previous week of its PrimeFire inkjet press, the list of inkjetters includes; Xerox and Fujifilm, Kodak, EFI, Ricoh, Konica Minolta, Epson, and Bobst. And they are only the drupa exhibitors that have made their announcements.
In the blizzard of new inkjet engines, misinformation and very optimistic predictions fly around as vendors claim special differentiation for their solution over everyone else. The truth is, developing inkjet science and technology beyond relatively simple slow moving wide format engines, is an expensive exercise fraught with difficulty.
There can be no better illustration than the case put forward by Martin Bailey, CTO of Global Graphics, maker of the Harlequin RIP. With a 30 year heritage in driving production systems, the company claims its Harlequin RIP drives the fastest inkjet presses on the market, including the HP PageWide Web presses, the fastest of which is capable of over 7000ppm. The Harlequin RIP also renders 80% of the world’s photobooks and approximately 70% of the world’s newspapers.
Bailey made the point that as inkjet speeds get faster the ‘dots’ tend to stray, to coagulate and join together. This is especially so when using commodity grade substrates as most printers, label and commercial seek to do on long jobs. Labels and packaging are the main target markets for inkjet vendors, so quality is as important as speed. Global Graphics is working with most of the vendors already named to create custom screening for their inkjet engines to fix the problem. But it’s not easy.
The physics of inkjet printing at high-speed means highlights are lost along with the appearance of streaking and mottling. Manufacturers have found that experimenting with hardware has not overcome these problems. Applying colour management software has also proved insufficient.
The UK-based Global Graphics is bringing its Harlequin multi-level digital screening to drupa as a solution. Described as a package of technology and services to tune multi-level half-tone screens for a specific press/media combination to produce the optimum quality, Bailey claims that within five years, almost all the inkjet presses will be equipped if not with high-speed Harlequin RIPs, then certainly with multi-level digital screening.
The bloodlines of the Harlequin RIP were also presented in Düsseldorf by its sister software company, Hybrid Software, which showcased its Cloudflow RIP for the packaging and label markets. The 64-bit RIP supports native PDF files and is claiming to be the fastest on the market.
The intense focus on inkjet has all the signs of being a bubble with prediction of more than 200 ‘new’ inkjet suppliers debuting at the upcoming drupa. The sector is easily divided into those who are going down the simple technology paths with fairly cheap entry-level machines at wide-format speeds and the higher end manufacturers with experience in solving many of the problems inherent in maintaining consistent, productive printing in terms of inkjet head maintenance, substrate compatibility, and the differences between water-based, solvent and latex inks.
For printers coming to drupa looking to get into inkjet there will be an overwhelming choice. But with even established vendors muddying the waters with claims of market leadership in different inkjet sectors, there has never been a more appropriate time to repeat the warning – let the buyer beware.