Streaming into the future: Print 21 magazine article

Stream inkjet technology is the game-changing technology from Kodak. First shown at last year’s drupa it is now commercialised into the Prosper range of printing presses. Over two days in Dayton Ohio, the company took a number of industry analysts through its digital technology strategies, culminating in the unveiling of the Prosper press. Patrick Howard was invited along for the viewing.

Go on, ask me anything about Wilber and Orville Wright, the aviation pioneers. Natives of Dayton, Ohio, they developed the first successful powered aircraft, the Wright Flyer, which Orville piloted in a flight that lasted 12 seconds and covered 120 feet at Kitty Hawk in 1903. I know about this because I spent a lazy Sunday afternoon walking around the Wright Brothers Aviation museum on the banks of the Mighty Miami River, Dayton. Did you know the brothers were printers?

Before they became famous aviators they ran their own presses and produced a weekly newspaper in the 1890s in addition to being bicycle repairers.

Flying to Dayton from Sydney for a two-day presentation gave me pause to reflect on how far we’ve come in the century since that first flight. I burned a ton of carbon flying over the Pacific and half the USA courtesy of the Wright Brothers’ invention.

Which was apt, because I was invited to Dayton by Kodak to see its new inkjet press invention, the Prosper Press, employing the Stream technology, which was first shown at drupa last year.

Was it worth the trip, the 27 hours each way over five days? Well, yes, it was. Many of these so-called inventions are mere tinkering around the edges of established technology but the Stream inkjet is a fairly radical departure. I had seen it in beta mode at drupa but this was an opportunity to get up close and examine the actual press model before it hits the market.

Into the future
For a long couple of days we covered the whole Kodak digital press line up, including the NexPress, the Digimaster range, as well as the latest Versamark inkjet, in addition to the new Prinergy 6 workflow. We heard from Kevin Joyce, vice president worldwide digital printing solutions, who emphasised his point that while the technology is good, it is not the main focus, rather total cost of ownership and  Kodak helping customers to make money. We heard from US customers of Kodak – Tom Fenske, Rapid City, South Dakota and Darrin Wilen, New York – printers that have transformed themselves into graphical communication companies, light years ahead of where we are. They use NexPress and Versamark VL presses to create high volumes of bright, personalised transpromo and direct marketing material as if this is the way printing has always been done.

Despite all that, we were there mainly to see what Kodak has done to bring Stream inkjet technology to market. We had to sign some non-disclosure stuff, but nothing significant. The press will be officially launched in September at Print 09 in Chicago and already there are a number of ‘pioneer’ (don’t call them beta) sites in operation in the States.

Inkjets under pressure
So what’s all the fuss about? Stream inkjet, as its name implies, is a stream of, usually, pigment-based ink expelled under pressure from a printhead. The system delivers a lot more ink to the substrate than other inkjet technologies that employ drop-on-demand (up to 10 times more) and can therefore image in a single high-speed pass. Because the printhead is continually filled with water-based ink there is no need for what are called humectants (liquid to keep the inkhead moist and unclogged), which means the ink dries faster on the substrate. The ink stream is broken into drops by passing through heated collars while the unwanted drops are air deflected and recirculated.

There are a number of clever parts to all this, mainly to do with the continual stream of ink. Getting sufficient ink onto the substrate at sufficient speed is the main game. DOD technologies do it by multiple arrays of inkheads, but with Stream the single array of high-velocity jets delivers the ink at a rate where speeds can be cranked up to match offset. The press images at more than 305 metres per minute over a 60 cm (24-inch) web.

Because the ink is under pressure it has a greater ‘throw’ avoiding errors from inkheads being too close to the substrate. The ink drops are all of a uniform size and therefore easy to control at speed. It professes to image at 600 dpi, emulating 175 lpi screening, and the results, when printed on inkjet treated paper, are practically indistinguishable from offset.

This last is important because while inkjet has the ability to print on practically any type of substrate, it only produces high-quality results on optimised paper. While this may seem to be a mark against the technology, in practice any printing where quality is a consideration will be printed on good stock. There is a price differential but it is not substantial.

Pictured: High-speed inkjet from the Prosper press.

Stream and Prosper
The Kodak people lay great emphasis on the fact that Stream is a technology capable of being formatted in many different ways. It is being brought to market under the product brand Prosper. The basic Stream unit is a print head that images in 10.56 cm swaths. This is already in use with the first Prosper S10 monochrome system sold to Instant Data Forms in Hong Kong where it will image the variable elements on essential mail. It can print at 600 fpm at maximum 600 dpi.

The highlight of the Dayton event was the unveiling of an operating four-colour web-fed Prosper press. In its target market of commercial print, books, catalogues and direct marketing materials, there is no doubt the quality and the speed make it a serious contender with any offset press.

However, while the question is it as good as offset? is still beloved by marketing types, it must be remembered that digital presses have their own benefits that cannot be replicated by offset. Digital printing is about variable data and short run, on-demand printing. It is the future paradigm of much marketing collateral and all essential mail. For the printer contemplating the purchase of a new offset press there is now an alternative that can match quality and speed and cost per page for the majority of commercial print jobs. This is a major watershed in the printing industry.

The emphasis on total cost of ownership is a welcome development from the digital printing sector. Consistent, reliable performance with increased uptime is essential when playing in the offset space. Prosper appears to have a longer life print head than its competitors – it claims 60 million A4 impressions before the jetting module needs to be replace, by the operator.

The Prosper press is commercially available from September and certainly when Jeff Hayzlett, marketing director, Kodak, was here in Australia during July he had great expectations for a local installation next year.

It may not change the world as much as the invention of flight but after the Stream press nothing will be the same again in the printing industry.

Is it as good as offset?
There is one benchmark for digital printing to aspire to – to be as good as offset. Ever since the advent of digital in the early 1990s we’ve heard claims from many different technologies that the print is as good as offset. At the beginning the problem was quality; toner print was nowhere near offset. In the past four or five years that test has been met and beaten. The quality from high-end digital printing is practically indistinguishable from offset.

But there is more to matching offset than quality. In the first place there is speed and then there is cost. These have been the great differentiators. Offset presses, especially web presses rattle along at a great rate of knots – the big newspaper presses at upwards of 900 mpm. Digital has not been in that race.
And cost; over a certain run length the cost of offset comes down as it gains the benefit of economy of scale, whereas the cost of the final digital print is the same as the first. Clearly there are horses for courses and for long static print jobs offset will never be headed.

There are, however, many print markets where the two technologies compete neck-and-neck and that struggle is intensifying. The average commercial printing job, which has a print run of less than 5,000 copies, is produced on a sheetfed press that typically will pump through 15,000 sheets per hour. The Prosper press with a top speed of 182 mpm (660 fpm) is much faster than that. Most of these billions of dollars of work are in play between offset and digital. The only question is, what’s the right technology for the job?

I came away from Dayton with two sample sheets, one offset and one Stream inkjet. Since then I’ve set them before a number of industry types and asked them to pick the difference. Under a loupe they can be detected but at arms length only one person picked them correctly.

Pictured: Kevin Joyce (left), vice president worldwide, Kodak Digital Printing, with Patrick Howard, in front on the first Prosper press in Dayton.

Who else is in the race?
High-speed inkjet has attracted a number of players as the industry edges towards more integrated digital production.

HP has its Inkjet Web Press in beta mode at a number of printing companies in the US. Its thermal inkjet DOD technology rockets along at 121 mpm (400 fpm) at 600 dpi. It is slower than the Kodak Prosper but it places a sealant on the substrate before inkjetting, which theoretically gives it a wider range of substrates. At 30-inch wide it is also wider than the Prosper and better able to service the newspaper industry.

Océ is also there with its JetStream 2800 printing at 130 mpm at 600 dpi. Again with a 30-inch wide web it has already garnered a lot of interest and initial installations for newspapers. While producing excellent quality no gone is going to say it is as good as offset, but it has variable dot-size inkjets and can be configured to print at different levels from mono to four-colour.

Screen’s Truepress Jet520 is a 20-inch wide piezo inkjet press that runs at 128 mpm (420 fpm). While not in the same contention as the others it cannot be ignored and has attracted a lot of attention from book printers.