HP Indigo opens 1st Asian ‘Electro Ink’ plant in Singapore

It’s easy to become enthusiastic about the prospects of digital printing when Benny Landa starts to prophesise (pictured centre with Michael Mogridge and Steve Donegal of HP Indigo). The landscape he reveals is one where print is no longer a ‘dumb’ medium, a commodity designed for the lowest common denominator destined for landfill, but a customised, particularised and intelligently addressed communication to the reader.

Digital printing will not only set the individual free to enjoy a world of tailor-made information, focused on special interests and tastes, but it will rescue the printing industry from the drudgery of simply replicating the same page over and over again. In this individualised world, consumers will be treated with care, recognised and valued by the corporations, which as Landa points out, generate over 60 per cent of all commercial printing as marketing collateral.

It is a landscape familiar to anyone lucky enough to hear Landa since he burst on the printing stage in 1992 with his revolutionary Indigo press at IPEX in Birmingham. Over the years he has filled in the details, bolstered his vision with facts, refined the technology to be better able to deliver the hard copy, but essentially his vision of a utopian digital future remains unchanged and undiminished.

Utopian? Well, yes, because a lot of the developments predicted by Landa in the 1990s have failed to arrive. Even he admits that his prediction that most print would be digital by 2007 was wrong, and is wrong. A lot of the applications for digital printing he promoted have also failed to materialise – when was the last time you saw a wedding party order personalised wine labels for the bottles, for instance? How many of us receive personalised brochures that have photographs of places we recently visited? Your magazine still comes in the same configuration, with the same number of pages as everyone else’s.

Landa’s famous dictum that, “Everything that can become digital, will become digital,” might be better cast in the light of experience as, “Just because something can become digital, does not mean it will become digital.”


Another light, another tunnel

For many of the early adopters of digital printing technology the light that appeared at the end of the tunnel turned out to be an oncoming train. The landscape in the late 1990s was littered with wrecks as pioneers went bust, business models failed to live up to expectations, and digital printing proved to be, all too painfully, limited in quality and application.

Many prepress companies, spooked by PostScript imaging and the appearance of computer-to-plate (CTP) – which meant their work was disappearing into the printing factories – jumped on board the digital printing train as a ride into the future. Many soon found it a rocky road and that selling print to end-users is not like selling film to other graphics companies.

Having heard the message of the unlimited potential for digital printing, and Benny Landa was not the only messiah, they ran hard up against market indifference. Marketing professionals did not, and many still do not, care about the potential for personalised printing. It does not matter that results show that even the barest nod towards personalised marketing will increase response rates exponentially. For the marketing industry it was all too hard. Besides, the databases were not in existence, or were so inaccurate that they could not be used.

(Only now are the complexities of personalised print marketing being addressed in a serious way.)


“Is that banding I see there?”

The other strength of digital printing was short run colour and here the technology itself let the pioneers down. From this vantage point no one will claim that the early digital presses were able to produce results anywhere near offset. Unreliable, out of colour registration, digital printing struggled to live up to its promise of being marketable printing.

Some was, of course, and the best pioneers laboured in the fields to get their machines into calibration and keep them there. They broke new ground, created new applications, took advantage of every new upgrade, boosted their computer power. They sold digital printing as an adjunct to offset, as a proofing system, as a print run of one, or five, or ten and struggled with invoicing such small jobs. It was not easy nor a job for the fainthearted. Many simply went broke and exited the industry, their angry voices raised against the whole technology.

But there were always more to take their place, led on to a great extent by the faith and vision of people such as Benny Landa. There is an inevitability to the ultimate victory of digital printing. The commercial printing market worldwide is worth US$400 billion (packaging is $300 billion and speciality printing another $140 billion). At present Landa claims that four per cent of commercial printing is digital, and while many in the industry think it will never realistically capture more than a minor percentage of the total, others point out, that even a small chunk will make for a very good business. Benny Landa still believes digital printing will take it all.

Onward! Onward!

Which is why it is always good to catch up with him when he appears at a HP Indigo function. Early this month he was in Singapore officiating at the inauguration of HP Indigo’s new Electro Ink plant, the first in Asia. He is still as messianic as ever, the vision of the promised land of digital commercial printing still clear before him. Relaxed now about the inevitable success of digital printing, he is becoming more focused on what he sees as the superior advantages of the HP Indigo imaging – understandably so, when you realise he has worked on it for over a quarter of a century.

He is scathing of the comparative advantages of any other digital printing technology such as xerography, especially for the commercial printing market. While accepting that inkjet and toner-based machines have their own provenance – consumers love inkjet, business loves toner – he resolutely maintains that only HP Indigo Electro Ink (or Electro EP for Electro Photographic) is able to compete on an equal footing with traditional offset ink for the commercial printing market.

He nominates offset quality, the ability to print on any substrate at high speed and low costs as the requirements for success. His message is that toner-based printing is the lowest quality, then offset and finally photographic imaging on top of the pyramid. As far as he is concerned Electro Ink is now surpassing photographic contone imaging in quality, while being much faster and cheaper than xerography. In his words, “Commercial printers love Electro EP.”

Digital printing has come of age

Even as his enthusiasm remains undimmed, there is a stronger timbre of reality in the Landa message these days. He concentrates more on the dynamics of successful digital printing for commercial printers, itemising the timeliness of on-demand digital, the cost benefits of short run digital printing and the revenue potential of personalisation. There is now a greater awareness that personalised print needs to be eye-catching, as well as simply addressed.

The broadening of the colour gamut of digital printing with a six colour process (IndiChrome), the ever widening range of press models – some more marketable than others – and the superior ink delivery systems and image reproduction of contemporary digital printing ensure there is less need to preach to the converted. With less than one per cent of the 400,000 commercial printing establishments worldwide owning a digital colour production press, and with more printers recognising the inevitability of their move into the sector, there are plenty of new converts to the cause.

Sales of digital presses are continuing to climb at a faster rate than any other. HP Indigo has over half the installed base of the one million pages duty cycle sector – NexPress and iGen3 are the other contenders. While it is doubtful if any of the manufacturers – HP, Xerox and Kodak – are actually making money out of the market, the climb towards critical mass of presses installed and pages being printed is accelerating.

Even if it is going to take a lot longer than he first thought before digital conquers the commercial printing world, the tide of history is flowing with Benny Landa.