Kodak is serious about digital
“It’s not about selling a generic solution or X number of boxes each year. It’s about taking the time to find out what works best for each customer, then tailoring the solution to their needs to ensure the result is a sustainable and profitable digital business now and in the future.” … Jon Field.
One of the key areas for Kodak is showing that it means business with digital print. Nobody doubts the company’s pre-eminence in the fields of offset printing with plates, CTP and proofing, but digital print is a different market with a new set of challenges. Kodak has a new digital business model to ensure its customers long term success.
In one respect, however, it has a definite advantage. While there are companies offering digital print solutions they offer no prepress solutions. Then there are prepress companies with no digital print, however only Kodak can offer both prepress and work-flow expertise coupled with a variety of Black and White and colour digital print technologies, with the benefit being seamless connectivity.
After all, Kodak is a company with over 100 years of expertise in imaging and vast experience in areas such as proofing and colour management. It has built its reputation on the quality of its proofing products and has a colour pedigree in the industry that is the envy of many.
“The expertise that’s available to us is very important in being able to service a client who is working across the whole digital arena,” said Ross Gilberthorpe, GCG marketing manager (pictured right). “We can take the colour knowledge that we have as a company and offer to educate our clients to enable them to maximise the quality and efficiencies of their systems.”
Is this your next press?
The flagship digital colour press from Kodak in terms of throughput quality and new versatility is the Kodak NexPress 2100 Plus Digital Production Press, the A3+ sheet size colour printer that is rivaling offset presses for overall print quality.
Jon Field, Kodak’s national manager for Digital Printing Solutions for Australia and New Zealand (pictured), likes to show printers one brochure printed on both the NexPress and an offset press and challenge them to spot the difference. Most give up or acknowledge that the NexPress pages are brighter and more colourful.
The next stage is to show the true versatility of the NexPress in areas such as its ability to print complex personalised print communications or its innovative fifth print unit that can be used to extend the colour gamut to match special corporate colours or add a gloss coating or a watermark on the almost 400 stock types it accepts. The NexPress 2100 Plus sample book of stocks where the same image has been printed on different stocks and matched for colour, is a very impressive demonstration of quality printing on gloss, satin, uncoated and recycled stocks ranging from 60 to 350gsm.
“With the opportunities that are there right now for people to expand into new markets, it’s more a matter of prioritising where they should invest their time to get the maximum reward for effort,” says Field, adding that this is where Kodak can offer real expertise and assistance to customers.
For instance, several NexPress users are now utilising web-to-print models that enable their customers to log-in via a password, bring up images and drop in text, proof and approve their work, get a quote and pay for it, all on-line, and automatically send the file through to the digital front end of a NexPress production press.
“That’s doing two things,” explains Field. “It’s lowering the unit cost of production, thereby making customers even more competitive, and it’s adding value for our customers and their customers by making it easier for them to do business and save time. Lowering our customers cost of production while adding value to what they produce, is what we at Kodak refer to as Value Innovation.”
Education is key
Education is a key element of Kodak’s value proposition in converting printers and their customers over to digital print to underpin their long term success, and as more and more applications take hold, the evidence becomes more overwhelming. When corporate clients start to see +30 per cent response rates on personalised direct mail items, as Kodak has shown, then the case and the ROI for going digital becomes more evident.
At Print 05 in Chicago, Kodak took orders for over 22 NexPress systems. While Australia does not have the population to follow the US and Europe in terms of press numbers, there are still NexPress users here in the top 20 volume users worldwide, producing up to 700,000 A4’s sheets per month.
“2006 will be about leveraging the new and emerging technologies, as well as taking the now mature print technology and applying it in new ways,” says Field. “People will be able to take content and shape it themselves, so what they end up with is a customised piece of communication of higher value because it is targeted to their customers.” “It’s about moving from being a content taker to a content creator”.
After all, Kodak is a company with over 100 years of expertise in imaging and vast experience in areas such as proofing and colour management. It has built its reputation on the quality of its proofing products and has a colour pedigree in the industry that is the envy of many.
Jon Field, Kodak’s national manager for Digital Printing Solutions for Australia and New Zealand (pictured), likes to show printers one brochure printed on both the NexPress and an offset press and challenge them to spot the difference. Most give up or acknowledge that the NexPress pages are brighter and more colourful.