Simon Enticknap’s drupa wrap up – it’s all about offset

Offset print was on everybody’s mind at drupa 08, but not in the way you might think. Digital press manufacturers are fixated on offset – how to match it and how to beat it - and, for the first time at this drupa, they came prepared to take it on. Simon Enticknap (below) had a ringside seat for the opening rounds of what promises to be the biggest stoush of the decade.

The tone was set by Antonio Perez, chairman and CEO of Kodak who declared at his company’s press conference on the opening morning of the show that he wanted Kodak to achieve “offset quality” in everything that it did. Not flexo quality (even the new flexo plate being launched by Kodak was tagged as delivering ‘offset quality’), not gravure quality and, God forbid, certainly not digital quality. It’s all about offset – who can do it, who can match it and, ultimately, who dares to supersede it.
With the major German offset press manufacturers adopting a cautious outlook for the coming year, largely as a result of concerns about the US market, the digital press manufacturers could smell blood in the water. They know the quality of their product can now match it with offset, the speeds are increasing, the cross-over run lengths (the point at which it becomes more economical to run a job offset or vice versa) are getting higher, and the market applications are expanding. For years we’ve heard talk about digital and analogue being ‘complementary’ and how the customer, in the end, doesn’t care how the job is produced. Not anymore. This is Steve Nigro, HP’s senior vice president of the graphics and imaging group, speaking at that company’s press conference on the same day:
“People will talk about this drupa as the digital drupa, when digital became mainstream.”

Ironically, the exception to this full-frontal assault on offset was the market leader in digital print, Xerox. Having previously and ill-advisedly claimed that it was going to be bigger than Heidelberg, the company adopted a more conciliatory tone at this drupa and even demonstrated a Heidelberg press on its stand to highlight the benefits of combined digital and offset workflows. Besides, Xerox had far more important things on its mind than knocking off offset. Blindsided by the emergence of the production inkjet systems that dominated this show, the company is now scrambling to show that it, too, can be an inkjet player.

So what is at stake here? Rokus van Iperen, CEO of Océ, presented some figures which showed that while the current digital production printing market is worth about €55 billion out of a total market of €510 billion per annum, there is a further €100 billion worth of work (approximately $170 billion) that is currently being printed offset or screen which could potentially move over to digital over the next decade - in effect a tripling of the current digital print market. That’s what this drupa was all about, the raison d’être for all the razzamatazz, the hype, the excitement, the buzz of discovering new technologies and ever-changing ways of putting colour onto a substrate; who is going to claim the lion’s share of this extra $170 billion which is up for grabs over the next ten years?

What it means for the printers, the people at the pointy end of this market whose job it is to decide how print will be produced and delivered in the future, is that this was the last drupa at which they could confidently plan for that future without including digital print in their calculations; by the time the next drupa rolls around it will already be too late.

Man gets a makeover
The day before drupa opens belongs traditionally to the German offset heavyweights who hold their press conferences in the morning and afternoon like two boxers at a weigh-in refusing to make eye contact.

MAN Roland kicked off by launching a new name and a new logo, henceforth to be known as manroland AG (one word, all lower case). Chairman of the executive board, Gerd Finkbeiner, said the new name and look was part of a continuing programme to position the company in preparation for its public float although he repeatedly refused to be drawn on when that might be. It was incorrect however, he stated, to say that the proposed IPO had been postponed or was ‘on hold’ as no specific date for it had previously been made public.

Finkbeiner went on to outline a number of core branding and values associated with the new company name. Among these, manroland aspires to be a “high performance business partner” to its customers while its core values have now been defined as groundbreaking, reliable, determined and inspirational.

In terms of new products, the main development was the introduction of a new press, the Roland 50, for the small sheet size market which Finkbeiner says will help the company plug a gap in its portfolio and appeal to a far wider group of printers, many of whom may subsequently go on to use larger presses.

“We were in the past handicapped by not being able to cover that market,” he said.
Demonstrated at drupa in a five-colour model, the new press includes many trademark manroland features found on the larger presses, including double-size impression cylinders and transferters for sheet travel. It can handle a maximum sheet size of 360 x 520 mm with substrate thicknesses from 0.04 mm up to 0.8 mm, making it suitable for printing on light board.

Other new products on the manroland stand included a Roland 900 with perfecting whose print samples were among the most eagerly sought-after at the show, and a Roland 500 with inline foiling which was printing a dazzling array of special effect sheets. In fact inline foiling – introduced by manroland on the Roland 700 at the last drupa – was commonplace this year on most of the offset press stands, along with UV inks and coatings, holographic effects and lenticular print.

In the web market, manroland showed a test unit of a 96-page Lithoman heatset press behind closed doors as well as a working demonstration of its robotic plate changing systems on a Colorman which is designed to change the plates on a entire newspaper pressline in under two and half minutes.

The ‘hei’ light of the show
Heidelberg used hall 2, one of two halls at the show dedicated to its equipment, to unveil an enormous range of presses, finishing equipment, platesetters, workflow and consumables. In front of the massive Speedmaster XL 162, the biggest press in the Heidelberg range, Jürgen Rautert, member of the Heidelberg management board, outlined the company’s extensive portfolio including nearly two dozen new products and solutions. Highlighting the fact that the cost of offset print has fallen by nearly 50 percent over the past decade, partly as a result of productivity improvements introduced by Heidelberg, Rautert said it was wrong to talk of price erosion in the industry.

“I call that innovation, not price erosion,” he said.

The Heidelberg exhibit was split into two main areas with hall 1 showing commercial print production while hall 2 focused on packaging production. Apart from the new XL 162, other presses on display included a new press for the medium format market, the Speedmaster XL 75 exhibited as a 10-colour perfecting model, a six- colour Speedmaster XL 105 running alcohol-free with UV inks and a 10-colour Speedmaster 52 with Anicolor which now supports Pantone colours.

Also in the press arena, Heidelberg demonstrated a new dedicated embossing and coating unit for the XL 105 that uses sleeve technology for applying an overall embossing or UV coat to a printed product. Heidelberg claims that switching between embossing and coating takes just minutes and that the use of sleeve technology will make embossing a much more cost-effective process for offset printers.

The product launches in other areas were equally impressive including a new Suprasetter 190 platesetter for the large format market, new high speed Stahlfolder TH 82 combination folder, and Dymatrix 106 Pro CSB die-cutter which features the same feeder as the XL 105 press for tighter integration into the Prinect workflow.
One of the most intriguing product announcements from Heidelberg however was not at drupa at all having previously been launched at the Interpack packaging exhibition at the same venue a few weeks earlier. This is the Linoprint – the name picking up on the Linotype legacy absorbed into Heidelberg a few years ago - an inkjet system for short-run packaging print onto flexible substrates. Could this be the start of Heidelberg getting back into digital print?

Digital takes over
If the day before drupa belongs to the offset heavyweights, then the opening day of the show was dominated by the digital players. Kodak, EFI, Epson, Xerox and HP all held media briefings and, as expected, digital inkjet presses were the main topic of conversation. EFI and Epson both highlighted narrow web reel-to-reel label systems: the Jetrion 4000 UV inkjet printer from EFI with a 139 mm web width, and a seven-colour prototype from Epson which uses a wider web and what are termed “offset-like” inks.

Screen and Fujifilm also featured digital inkjet but in a cut-sheet format. The Truepress Jet SX from Screen is an A2-sheet size press capable of running at about 1,600 sheets per hour at 1,440 x 720 dpi resolution while the Fujifilm Jet Press 720 uses a similar page size with a resolution of 1,200 dpi and a claimed speed of 2,700 sheets per hour. The Screen press is aimed primarily at over-printing of variable data onto pre-printed offset sheets while the Fujifilm press is aimed at short run full colour printing up to 2,000 copies.

In the continuous feed inkjet field, HP seems to have the jump on its competitors with its HP inkjet web press offering the right combination of speed, web width and quality, plus it has three beta sites lined up which brings it one strep closer to the real world. At drupa it showed a wider 914 mm web capable of printing 8-up duplex at a rate of nearly 200,000 A4 pages per hour. This is true production-class printing. Preliminary pricing puts the narrower 762 mm wide web version at US$2.5 million, due for release late next year.

In response, Océ has introduced three new versions of its JetStream (as you may have surmised ‘jet’ is rapidly becoming the most over-used word in the industry) with different speeds to cater for varying price points and production requirements. Océ also has a JetStream site running successfully in the US so in that sense it is ahead of the pack.

Kodak continues to augment its Versamark range with the release of the VL2000 which is running slower than other Versamark models but with higher quality. The company also unveiled its continuous inkjet Stream technology, both in the form of a hybrid press combined with a Müller Martini offset press, and a standalone digital press with a narrow web.

So where does all this inkjet activity leave Xerox, still the leading supplier of digital print equipment and the company most responsible for taking digital print mainstream? In one of the more unusual presentations of the show, it spent a good deal of its media briefing showcasing the fact that it too has inkjet technology, albeit in the form of a lab prototype which is still clearly many months away from ever seeing the light of day. All this talk of inkjet clearly has the company rattled; on the one hand, it points out, quite legitimately, that many of the inkjet systems on display from competitors are not expected to be ready until next year at the earliest, while at the same time it feels the need to showcase its own inkjet developments which are even further off the map.

This is a pity because the toner-based products that Xerox does have ready to go now are first-class, including a new version of the iGen, now called the iGen4, plus improvements to the iGen3 which will continue in production, and a new ConceptColor 220 press which is effectively two iGens spliced together to deliver a full colour cut-sheet speed record of 220 pages per minute. A new Xerox 700 colour press is aimed at the entry-level digital production market, offering 70 pages per minute on stock from 64 to 300 gsm, A3 oversize.

Focused on the finish
Apart from the actual print engines, much of the action in the digital print arena focused on finishing with all the major players showing inline applications. As a result, the most ubiquitous manufacturer at drupa was Hunkeler which made an appearance on nearly every digital print stand performing a range of unwinding, winding, cutting, folding, stacking and conveying operations. Short run books were prominent as were digital newspapers where Océ stole the show for Australian visitors with its daily production of the Sydney Morning Herald. Océ’s on-demand book, Roll Over Gutenberg, was notable too, despite the terrible title and dull cover, for having genuinely good content which actually made the book worth reading. Xerox showed what it could do too with a repeat of its Lonely Planet guide of Sydney and one for the local Düsseldorf region.

Digital finishing also extended into short run, personalised packaging and labels with a variety of applications being shown. This is obviously a market in which suppliers see a lot of scope for growth and the results were both impressive and sometimes quirky. When it comes to packaging, it seems there is no limit to what can be personalised; some of this is useful from a security and anti-counterfeiting point of view but others, such as the personalised chewing gum packets on the Xerox stand are almost too cute. Still, it’s a market and printers are making money from it.
Meanwhile, out in the badlands of the Messe stretching from hall 10 into the teens where the paper handling, converting and packaging players congregate, digital print’s aspirations to market dominance, in packaging or otherwise, seem rather ridiculous. This is the other side of the industry, one which is rarely reported on, where print runs are measured in the millions and a whole different set of manufacturers vie for a slice of the graphic arts pie. It may not be as glamorous as variable data digital print but the stakes are just as high and the competition intense.

Offset still pumping
At the end of each long drupa day, the offset machines in Heidelberg’s halls 1 and 2, as well as elsewhere, are still pumping out the sheets. In between times, printers and interested onlookers can be found crawling all over the presses eager to find out what’s new with offset. Print samples too are widely available and quickly grabbed by visitors to take home as souvenirs of drupa 08.

In contrast, output from some of the newer digital print engines is tightly controlled, as are the conditions under which they are both viewed and run. It’s understandable given the sensitive nature of the technology being developed and the high stakes involved, but it highlights too that however much the digital pretenders may seek to emulate offset print, in many ways they still have a lot of catching up to do.

It wasn't all work at drupa. Visitors were able to chill out  at the artificial beach in the grounds of the messe. You might even be at Bondi … well, not really.