The real drupa is the reel drupa: Andy McCourt's commentary

Attaching a label to each drupa is both sport and pastime for many people in the industry. In 2004 it was supposed to be the "JDF Drupa" in 2000 the "CTP Drupa." From an extraordinarily hot and humid Duesseldorf where even a Sydney summer-style hailstorm dinged a few cars, Andy McCourt casts an eye over the whole show and finds an important trend emerging that has far-reaching implications for us all. And it's not just inkjet.

"The Inkjet Drupa" is the tag some have tried to apply to drupa 2008. If people came to exhibitions just for the catchy label, they would get pretty poor value. The scramble to be the pundit who picks the elusive zeitgeist of a drupa delves deep into egos salved by the accolade "Yes, you're a star! You're the one who picked the earth-shattering secret trend! Bravo!"

I'm only human so I'll have a go. Print21 and I are proud to announce that this drupa in the Year of Our Lord 2008 is: "The Guillotine Knife Drupa." I'll cut to the quick – Schnellschneidemaschinen need knives/blades and without the likes of Klingelnberg, Rolf Meyer, Slittec and a host of others who provide a sharp focus to our industry, all would be lost. At this point you probably think I've gone barking mad or have spent too much time down in the Aldstadt. Stay with me; we are approaching the cutting edge of this article.

You see, there are a lot of new inkjet presses here at drupa. There are also new high-speed toner digital presses. But it's inkjet that excites because of its promise of high speed, non-impact and variable or versioned output. Last week you read here about the pristine copies of the current Sydney Morning Herald coming off the Océ Jetstream 2200. At the PIAA-organised Aussie BBQ, even the weekend edition with supplements was available for those hungering for home news – printed, collated and cut in Hall 6 at drupa.

HP previewed its Inkjet Web Press; Xerox made much of the fact it has an inkjet press coming up so everyone should wait; Kodak says it will change printing forever when its Stream technology comes to market; Screen churned out a selection of newspapers on its Truepress Jet520s, Miyakoshi actually had a 4-unit CMYK inkjet press with UV curing running; Océ pumped its Jetstream family up to 2,700 ipm while Ricoh proudly showed the fruits of its IBM alliance with InfoPrint 5000 in full colour.

The 'reelality' is CF
But whether toner or inkjet, all the new developments had one thing in common - they all used continuous feed - reels of paper instead of sheets. Narrow web to use the old term. I can hear all the sheetfed printers switching off now, but don't. Continuous feed (CF) printing will become a major force right across the mid to high volume sector of our industry in years to come and printers who define themselves as 'sheetfed only' should take note. Why?
* CF significantly reduces the paper cost-per-page. Under 0.9 of a cent per A4 was often cited by the major players.
* CF has a drastically smaller carbon footprint and uses far less energy in its life cycle from mill to finished product. A reel of paper for CF needs minimal re-handling and packaging. Cut-sheets come out of the mill as reels, are slit and sheeted, wrapped in reams of about 500, boxed in cartons of about 5,000 sheets and all this waste packaging has to be disposed of. A big reel of CF paper is virtually straight from the mill and Kraft wrapped, that's all.
* CF lends itself to dramatically higher speeds than cut sheet digital print, again using less energy. The fastest cut-sheet digital colour press at drupa is probably running at 120 A4s per minute. CF full colour digital inkjet running on Océ's Jetstream is at 2,400-2,700. HP's Web Inkjet Press promises up to 3,300 A4 impressions per minute.
* CF reduces human intervention and facilitates total inline production of books, magazines, brochures, marketing collaterals and versioned newspapers.
* When CF is combined with cut-sheet digital for heavier cover stocks, a powerful publishing configuration is created that is both cost-effective and versatile for other types of work, e.g. Transpromo, annual reports, educational books etc.
* CF is just much cheaper and greener, and you should know what that means for the future.

The obvious fact about CF is that it eventually needs converting into sheets. This has empowered companies such as Hunkeler, PFE, Mueller Martini and Lasermax Roll Systems who were to be seen on all the major digital CF press supplier stands, cutting, folding and collating CF jobs either inline in long production trains or offline with the digital press printing reel-to-reel and the printed reel transferred to the finishing line.

The dynamics of digital workflow and colour printing do not restrict CF to longer print run jobs. Neither is it restricted only to Transactional work. Jobs can change "on-the-fly" with zero make-ready times and runs as short as a single copy.

CF Sheetfed offset too?
Even in the offset world, CF has resulted in an innovative, greener and more cost-efficient press with sheet characteristics - the Goss M600 Folia blanket-to-blanket press – which is reel-fed right up to the end where a VITS sheeter turns output into sheets – all at a print speed of up to 30,000 impressions per hour. Folia is the web offset industry's version of a CutStar feeding a long perfector (web feed, sheeted then print), but faster.

So maybe calling this the Guillotine Blade Drupa is not so silly after all? CF throughput needs to be slit and cut and CF is in ascendancy, so we will see much more cutting and finishing inline.

But the real drupa is too all-encompassing to suffer from pigeon-holing or benign tagging. Nevertheless, I'll stick my neck out and suggest that the real drupa is the "Reel drupa" because digital colour presses, having established a firm foothold in the sheetfed sector, are invading web space and, in doing so, blurring the lines between sheetfed and webfed jobs forever.

In digital printing, cut sheet is no longer enough. Serious printers, transaction-promotional or otherwise, will have to get 'reel.'

Pictured: Reels roll on at drupa for digital, says Andy McCourt.