Rock of pages – Color 1000 takes centre stage

Fuji Xerox powered up its new star digital engines to a packed house of over 300 digital printers in Sydney last night.

They flew in from all over for the spectacular rock’n’roll-themed launch in the cavernous old railway sheds at Eveleigh. Smoke machines, a laser show and Shannon Noll’s rock band blended with 60s psychedelic graphics to promote the Printer’s Dream.

Simon Lane, national manager, production services business, took the audience on a history tour to describe how the digital technology has arrived at its current level. The music theme provided a backdrop for the changes since Chester Carlson invented xerography in the 19030s.
Examples of the machine’s five colour printing, including the groundbreaking cover of the most recent issue of Print21 magazine, were distributed to demonstrate the quality and flexibility of the engine. The launch is the company’s most significant introduction of new technology for a number of years.
The Color 800 and1000 carry a load of expectations for sales by the people at Fuji Xerox, who said they were confident the presses would be well received by the market.

The launch comes during a watershed year for Fuji Xerox with its digital print volumes setting new records. According to Henryk Kraszewski, marketing manager, production color systems, (pictured here in full rock garb along with Anthony Dixon, Color press expert) digital colour print volumes broke the one billion pages per year benchmark in March. It also broke the 100,000 pages per month record and breezed past 4 billion pages in total since Fuji Xerox entered the production colour market in the late 1990s.

The increase in the amount of digital production colour comes at a time when the overall amount of print has fallen by over 20% in the past two years.
It also comes at a time when the amount of competition in the digital colour production space is ramping up with new machines launched this year by Konica Minolta, Canon and Ricoh as well as Fuji Xerox.

A number of Color 800/1000 early adopters, those who have already installed the new machines, were presented with gold records at last night's event.