Turning the world Indigo: Print 21 magazine article

Few people can claim to have had a profound impact on the printing industry across the world. Benny Landa is one of them. When it was launched in 1993, his Indigo digital offset colour press was the most significant development for 100 years. Today he keeps his counsel at home in Israel, but spoke exclusively to Gareth Ward.

Fourteen years ago Benny Landa and Indigo burst on the scene with a message that has had the printing industry in a spin ever since. At Ipex 1993 digital colour printing arrived and nothing would ever be quite the same again. Today, Benny Landa is largely retired, having sold Indigo to HP at the end of 2001, but he keeps a close eye on developments from his home in Israel, where naturally he retains a laboratory. It's a modest affair, he says, with around 14 researchers.

He is also involved in a number of investment projects, the best known of which is 3D imaging technology company Human Eyes. This has helped revive interest in lenticular imaging, but the real goal is the 3D computer screen. Another interest is Mirage Innovation which is developing a pair of wearable screen glasses so that the user donning the spectacles can view video content as if on a large screen.

What Landa brings to this and other fledgling companies is his considerable expertise in setting up technology companies.

"I can help them avoid the mistakes I made," he says. "And in that way add some value."

In the beginning
Indigo was first set up 30 years ago though it took until Ipex 93 for the first ePrint 1000 Indigo digital press to appear and to challenge the established order. At that time, it seemed as if the rest of the industry had made mistakes on a grand scale. Printing press suppliers at the time were more relaxed about technology developments, perhaps bordering on complacency, and disruptive changes were few and far between. Sheetfed presses used plate scanners, there was the new option of assisted plate changing and minders could set ink ducts from a control desk. The impact of the Xerox Docutech, introduced three years earlier, had been minimal and could be dismissed as one step better than photocopying.

Into this came the tall figure of Benny Landa surrounded by dry ice, a sound and light show in an enclosed theatre with ticket only access, which only added to the mystique of the presentation. Landa had, and still has, presentation skills that are second to none and the power of the message hit home. Digital printing was real, the quality was good and whether or not it would wipe away existing technologies within a few years was fiercely debated.

A decade of hype followed that Ipex, supported by overly optimistic research forecasting how digital would sweep aside all other kinds of printing. Conventional press suppliers were galvanised into new developments both to produce digital or quasi-digital presses and to make existing machines easier to run and faster to set up and so squeeze the short run advantage that digital presses had.

At Print 01 in Chicago, Heidelberg CEO Bernhard Schreier even promised that Heidelberg would become the leader in volume level digital printing. Hubris followed as recession across the globe meant regrouping.

Shock of the new
The shock of digital has produced an explosion in technology for offset presses: presetting, plate changing as standard, CTP, long perfectors and JDF. All have contributed to a huge boost in productivity while, at the same time, sophisticated funding deals have allowed most printers to invest in these high capacity presses. The consequence is litho printing has become cheaper and easier than it has ever been, supply has leaped ahead of demand and offset printers are struggling with wafer thin margins. It is the digital printers who are making money and expanding.

"The industry in general is in very difficult straits. I think that's the reason for the interest. We are seeing quite a tremendous uptake both for ourselves and our competitors," says Landa, speaking from an Indigo perspective. "The growth in pages produced outstrips the demand for machine placements. Indigo machines across the world are producing 1.2 billion page impressions a month. This is impressive when you consider that five years ago the rate was one fifth of that."

Most of this growth is coming from the commercial print sector where printers are reluctant to add traditional capacity when rates for litho printing are low and where digital can offer additional services and revenue at decent margins. This is the path that Landa expected the industry to follow in 1993.

"The biggest surprise for me was that at the beginning there was this fantastic technology, why isn't everybody beating down the doors demanding to have it?

"I've since realised that there are three reasons for the slow uptake at the beginning. First there was no end user demand for digital printing. It simply hadn't existed before and no buyers knew about it. Secondly, commercial printers are mostly family-run small businesses and they didn't have the skills to generate the demand. They were accustomed to customers coming to them for a service, they couldn't create the demand. And for these types of business, the investment was too much of a risk. Thirdly the digital printing products were just not reliable enough to build an on-demand print business. In commercial print, if a machine goes down for a few hours and there's a two week delivery time it's not important. But in on-demand printing you can't have a machine fail. None of us could live up to that in the early days."

Improved electronics, materials, paper and the expertise that HP has brought to bear has changed all that and there is no doubt that machines today are up to the task. Further digital printing is only going to become faster, more reliable and cheaper. The inflection point, after which a technology becomes accepted and the way is clear for rapid take up, has passed.

"The products in the market really do enable companies to make money," he says. The question is finding the right model.

The power of one-to-one
At that Ipex 93 launch, Landa had talked about the power of one-to-one marketing, how advertising in this way was vastly more powerful than scattergun messages. At the same Ipex, Xeikon had introduced its digital colour press emphasising short run print production rather than variable data printing as Indigo had chosen to do.

"We had started with the idea of a short run press, but switched to the variable data press. And in the 1990s that idea was very new. Variable data printing needed databases, the ability to process information at speed and the desire to target customers. That was also in pre-internet days.

"Today there is tremendous awareness of the value of personalisation, targeting and printing on-demand. Corporate customers understand that. And printers have become much more sophisticated in the way that they sell their services to customers," he adds.

The internet has freed up information gathering and eliminated any problems with digital communications and created new markets for digital printing, including business to consumer models thanks to digital photography. Indigo's presses are well suited to printing photo-like quality and it has proved to be one of the fastest growing markets with companies like Shutterfly having rooms filled with presses printing digital photographs. Says Landa: "Digital photography is having a huge impact that simply was not foreseen 15 years ago.

"In those days I did my own share of predicting. It's only with hindsight that you see how much the industry has evolved. For instance, I couldn't believe that with digital offset colour printing, all printers would not embrace it immediately. But offset became less expensive and was able to do short runs, which did not hep us."

Today the power of variable data printing is well recognised as is on-demand print. Digital printing has earned its place in books and is established in the production of marketing literature and brochures. Other areas remain under developed.

"Digital presses," Landa explains, "are not yet ready for mainstream direct mail operation with the huge volumes they would need to print."

Different types of digital print technology will find their sweet spot in terms of product and application.

"There's nothing that is likely to displace inkjet as the technology used in the home, nor is there anything to supplant digital offset printing in the commercial printing space for matching the look and feel of offset litho quality," he says.

As for newspapers, another area where digital has made little impact, Landa expects the product to change as much as the method of producing it.

"I'm not a great believer in the long term viability of the newspaper as we know it today. Digital communication via the internet or SMS is taking its toll. The problem is that as soon as advertisers decide that newspapers are not cost-effective, it will be the end because newspapers are not viable without advertising."

The thrill of change
Landa is more optimistic about other forms of printing, pointing out that paper and print have distinct advantages over the internet. He explains: "The internet is not the best way to promote your company. You need to be able to push the message to the customer and you can't do that over the internet. Mail on the other hand is extremely acceptable. It has been for thousands of years and is still and people love to have a piece of paper in their hand. They love brochures, holding and touching something that's printed beautifully. There's something very culturally acceptable about print."

This, however, may change as a younger generation grows up with digital media and especially with the advent of portable, either fold away or roll up screens. Eventually people are going to feel as comfortable with these as they are with paper today, Landa says. That technology is currently under development and will eventually be able to handle the lush colours that consumers are used to with print. Just how long this will be Landa is not guessing.

"Print is not going to disappear in my lifetime. It is going to continue to be the main medium even if its role is diminished.

"Once everything is all digital, the thrill of having been part of the digital transformation from analogue will have gone. People will never again experience that. I'm glad to have had the experience of using a mechanical typewriter."