Oce VarioPrint i300
As sheetfed toner engines go in for effects and long sheets, the latest sheetfed inkjets are getting more affordable. Simon Eccles analyses the latest trends.
Sheetfed digital press technology currently seems to be in something of a crossover period. Dry toner technology seems to have got about as fast (and as big) as it is ever going to, with no big technical breakthroughs on the horizon. Meantime, sheetfed inkjet presses are very highly priced compared to toner, but evidently have huge future potential for speed, quality and format improvements.
Sheetfed manufacturers are still refining their toners for ever smoother results. For example, Xerox’s mid-range Versant 2100, announced a year ago, uses the latest version of the EA chemically grown ‘dry ink’ toner, as first seen in the high end Colour 1000 press. This aims to give offset-like quality, rather than the giveaway sheen of some digital print. Smoother tones are possible with 10-bit imaging depth.
Ricoh, a relative latecomer to sheetfed digital colour presses in 2008, introduced the new C7100 and C9100 presses last September. These feature new lasers and imaging systems that allow a resolution of 1200 x 4800 dpi. The C9100’s speed of 130 A4 pages per minute is good for its class, but the latest sheetfed inkjets can double that as we will see.
By now it is clear that toner presses will not go any wider. Only Xeikon has managed commercial success with its 500+ mm wide web fed dry toner engines. Everyone else sticks to SRA3 widths around the 305+ mm mark.
So, resolutions are probably good enough, you cannot go wider format and speeds are hitting a barrier. The number of colours is limited to five or six by toner fusing constraints. So, what is next for toner presses?
The answer in recent years has been extra print length, spot colours and special effects. More and more toner presses can print ‘long sheets’ of 650 mm, 700 mm and even more than 1000 mm. The Xerox iGen 150 (and the previous iGen4) can be configured for 660 mm sheets while Kodak’s NexPress SX3300 and SX3900 models can now handle 914 mm with optional feeders. The new Ricoh C9110 has an air-assisted duplex banner mode for up to 900 mm. MGI’s Meteor models have long been able to handle long sheets, with today’s top end Meteor DP8700 XL+ being able to print banners up to 1200 mm long.
Another route for toner presses to add value has been in special effects. Kodak started this as long ago as 2008 with the Dimensional option on the fifth unit of its NexPress SE and SX models. This allowed a spot clear image to be printed and then heated to swell up to give a distinct embossed effect. Kodak now has a whole suite of Fifth Unit Imaging Solutions, including a metallic gold, security-fluorescent MICR, conventional clear spot, light black and several gamut-expanding spot colours.
Only HP has equivalent to Dimensional ink, so far with a slow multi-pass ink build-up system. However, clear spot varnish is now a relatively common option on fifth units. Earlier this year Xerox announced metallic silver and gold toners as fifth unit options with its high end Colour 8001/1000i presses. Samples of the gold and silver we have seen are eye-catching if not highly glossy. So far Kodak has not announced a silver, which is a pity as this can be overprinted with other colours to give a whole range of metallic effects.
HP has offered six and seven colour capability on its Indigo liquid toner presses almost from the start. There is no metallic so far (one is rumoured) but the company has seen considerable take-up of the opaque white ink launched at drupa 2012. This can be used as a white mask coat over metallic substrates or laminates, giving an attractive effect that is both cheaper than hot foil stamping and allows the effect to be variable from copy to copy.
Ricoh’s Pro C7100 also offers an opaque white, but only on its fifth unit. This means that if you want to use it as an undercoat over special media, you have to send the sheet through twice, once for white and the second time for CMYK. Indigos can be set up with the ink in any order, so white undercoat is possible in the same pass.
The UK’s first Xerox iGen 150 went into ImageData Group in Brighton in 2013. This press takes sheet lengths up to 660 mm
Inkjet advances
So, to some extent, sheetfed technology performance is marking time, while the manufacturers are adding value by increasing sheet length and effects. It is a different story for inkjets, which may one day take a lot of the sheetfed market away from toner engines, but are not ready to do so yet.
Finally though we are starting to see sheetfed inkjet presses arrive that are, if not exactly low priced, becoming comparable to the top end of the toner press league. Will this allow sheetfed inkjet to break out of the niche markets and low sales volume that it has been confined to so far?
In particular, the £420,000 SRA2 format Delphax elan, announced at drupa 2012, has started to reach real users in North America in the past year. This year Canon introduced the B3 format Océ VarioPrint i300, for around £800,000. Late last year Xerox announced the £610,000 A4 Rialto 900, a compact roll-fed A4 press designed to fit into sheetfed workflows. Fujifilm’s second generation Jet Press 720S was also announced early this year, with a price around £950,000.
When the first sheetfed inkjet presses were announced by Fujifilm and Screen way back at drupa 2008, the market appeal seemed to be their B2 formats. The idea was that such digital presses could fit easily into offset installations whose paper stock, paper handling and finishing equipment is geared towards B2 offset, the most popular printing format in most of the world.
By contrast the challenges of building dry toner engines wide enough to handle B2 formats are such that only Xeikon has done it with any commercial success. Everyone else sticks to SRA3 widths, though increasingly we are seeing long sheet models that can print 650 mm and even 1,000 mm+ lengths.
At drupa 2008 the world and its dog rolled up, saw the B3 inkjet prototypes from Fuji and Screen and thought something like: ‘Interesting. A bit slow, but let’s wait until we hear the price.’ It took another four years, until drupa 2012, before these machines were really ready to ship. By then a redesign had given the Screen press the ability to print duplex, at a rather sedate 810 sheets per hour, while Fujifilm’s Jet Press 720 was simplex only but with a claimed 2700 sheets per hour. When the price emerged, at well over £1 million for both models, a common reaction was: ‘I can buy a decent Heidelberg offset press for that, and get 18,000 sellable B2 sheets per hour.’
At drupa 2012, Konica Minolta demonstrated the KM-1, a sheetfed B2 press developed in partnership with Komori. It prints 1650 B2 duplex sheets per hour and gets around the substrate and drying challenge of water-based inkjet by using a UV-LED cured ink. Similarly to the Fuji and Screen B2 inkjet presses the target price was £1.2 to £1.3 million. We are still waiting for commercial shipping though rumour has it there is a beta running in the USA.
Why are these early B2 sheetfed inkjet presses so very expensive? Challenged on this, the manufacturers will shuffle their feet a bit, go off the record, then say the printheads cost a small fortune and the development cost several large fortunes, so they would like to get their money back.
Unfortunately, charging high prices has kept the potential buyers’ pool small, so only a few tens of these first generation sheetfed presses have sold worldwide. Presumably the developers are playing a long game, gaining experience with field users, and perhaps intending to announce more cost-effective second generation models at drupa next year.
High prices cannot be the whole issue. List prices have little relevance in the high end digital print market, where things like lease terms, click rates and ink costs are the real cost factors. The decision to buy is mainly coloured by whether a new technology will allow a print service provider to offer new and profitable products in an otherwise commoditised print market. It is not the size of the investment that matters, more the return on investment.
The fact that there is a significant demand for the right sort of high priced B2 digital presses is indicated by HP, which is seeing respectable sales for its Indigo 10000 sheetfed B2 duplex liquid toner digital press, whose price is usually quoted as around £1.5 million.
Xerox Rialto 900 inkjet press
What’s the base?
Last October InfoTrends estimated that about 140 digital B2 presses had been installed worldwide since drupa 2012 by the spring of 2014, so we can assume that this figure has grown in the past 12 months. In view of the low number of announced inkjet sales, the majority must be HP Indigo 10000 commercial and 30000 carton presses. But now there are new sub-million inkjet presses to consider, the balance might shift.
Last year Fujifilm announced a second generation Jet Press 720S, with significant productivity tweaks and a drop in starting price to just under £1 million. This has seen increased market interest and more sales compared with the original Jet Press model.
Delphax was a surprise entrant to this sector in 2012, announcing its elan press just before drupa and showing one running at the exhibition. After a couple more years’ development the commercial launch of the elan came in April 2014.
Apart from this being the first use of Memjet high speed but low cost heads in a sheetfed press configuration, what makes the elan really stand out was its cost: the list price starts at £420,000. This is half the price of anything comparable in that size range, yet it is the fastest sheetfed digital press on the market.
The elan can print up to 3750 SRA2 single-pass duplex sheets per hour, equivalent to 500 A4 page images per minute. This is faster than any other B2 sheet fed digital press (Indigo included), though some reel fed inkjets in the 52 cm range are faster. It can optionally be configured to print one or two spot colours or MICR ink as well as CMYK. The duty cycle is up to 1.9 million A4s per month.
Take up has been slow despite the attractive specifications and price: so far there have only been three commercial elan installations, all in North America. The first, at CompuMail in California, started as the beta site. This is used for direct mail. Another has been purchased by the Canadian Public Works and Government Services printer in Quebec City for cheque printing (with a CMYK + MICR ink set), while the third user has not been identified yet.
B3 contender
Canon showed a prototype B3 sheetfed inkjet press it called Niagara a couple of years ago. In February this year it was launched as the VarioPrint i300, priced at around £800,000. The company says this ‘fills the speed and capacity gap that exists between conventional high-end toner-based cut sheet printers and entry-level continuous-feed inkjet presses.’
Chris Aked, UK marketing manager for the Canon Océ range, says that the i300 is a crossover system, essentially taking the piezo inkjet system and ink developed for the ColorStream 3000 web press and putting these together with the paper transport from the sheetfed VarioPrints.
A full specifications list has yet to be published, but the press can run up to 3800 duplex B3 sheets per hour, or 8500 duplex A4 sheets. This is 253 A4 images per minute on B3. The Océ VarioPrint 6320 Ultra sheetfed press can hit 315 A4s per minute, but that is monochrome. No other sheetfed colour toner engine can approach the i300’s speed, though the SRA2 elan inkjet beats this with 500 A4s per minute. The latest Xeikon 9800 512 mm web fed toner press can manage 290 A4s per minute on 60 gsm paper and 260 on 90 gsm.
The other sub-million inkjet newcomer is the Xerox Rialto 900, announced in February with a price around £614,000. It has a true resolution of 600 x 600 dpi though the use of greyscale heads gives the visual equivalent of 1000 dpi. This is built in the Impika factory in France and is the first jointly developed press to be released since Xerox bought Impika in 2013.
This is a roll-fed CMYK duplex press that delivers A4 duplex sheets. We are considering it here because it is aimed at printers who only need A4 documents and would otherwise probably have bought a sheetfed toner press. Its dimensions of 3580 x 1550 x 1600 mm (LxWxH) are impressive considering this includes the integral roll feed (with on-the-fly splicing), integral sheeter/trimmer and delivery.
Its output of 320 A4 images per minute (ie 160 duplex A4 sheets) is faster than any other digital sheetfed press other than the Delphax elan. On the other hand, you cannot easily change and mix papers as with a true sheetfed press, and A4 or longer banners is all it can produce.
Whatever next?
So, where is sheetfed inkjet today and where is it headed? It is evident that inkjet will not sell just because it is an elegant technology. Unless the price/performance ratios approach those of toner, it will not be a big seller in the sheetfed market. As the speed of the original sheetfed inkjets was so unimpressive, there was not a lot of incentive to consider them as alternatives to much cheaper high end toner presses such as the Kodak NexPress or Xerox iGen models.
Finally though, the latest lower cost sheetfed inkjets are starting to look like real alternatives to toner engines, and not just niche products in search of niche applications.
