Benny Landa claims that his forthcoming Nanography digital presses will match offset costs and quality. Simon Eccles examines his arguments.

It is rare in our time to meet an individual who has brought a new printing process to market. Benny Landa managed it at Indigo with digital offset colour in 1993 and now he is hoping to repeat his success a second time with Nanography. Ten years after selling Indigo to HP he bounced back into the print sector at drupa 2012 as founder and chief executive officer of Landa Digital Printing. His range of prototype presses and a spectacular theatre show were a major highlight of the exhibition, so it is a pity that he has chosen not to exhibit at Ipex this month.

He said that with more than 430 ‘letter of intent’ deposits, he would rather concentrate on getting the first presses built than have the distraction of another print show before drupa 2016. However, it seems he cannot resist the draw of Ipex altogether, so he is due to make a presentation there on 25 March as a keynote speaker in the World Print Summit. We will doubtless hear more about the

Landa S10FC press, the B1 carton press that will be first of the range of Landa Nanography presses. This uses Landa’s microscopic particle NanoInk and a unique offset inkjet and dry transfer process to print at up to 13,000 sheets per hour on standard offset cartonboard or plastic. The first presses are due to reach test sites towards the end of this year. Last autumn Mr Landa visited London and talked about major configuration changes to the S10FC that were widely reported in Digital Printer and other publications.

We have covered how NanoInk and the press technology works in Digital Printer in the past, but if you need a refresher there are videos and white papers on the Landa website, here: www.landanano.com.

However, Mr Landa also spoke for two hours on the background to Nanography, stating that it will revolutionise the costing model for digital printing and allow it to compete with offset in run lengths of 5000, 10,000 and eventually 20,000 sheets. Online commentators can (and do) scoff that he has yet to deliver anything, but his economic arguments are worth examining for anyone interested in a vision for the possible future of print.

Mr Landa’s core message starts with his assertion that today’s digital presses only capture a fraction of the world’s print market. ‘We launched Indigo ePrint 1000, the first digital offset colour press, at Ipex 1993,’ he said.

‘Since then there’s been an explosion in digitally printed paper, which now is over a trillion pages printed annually, digitally, and that’s a fantastic thing. It was a slow take-off but it just accelerated. But there is a total of 50 trillion pages printed overall, and the other 98% are printed by non-digital presses. We want some of that 98%.’

 

Bigger is best

A notable feature of the Landa prototypes at drupa 2012 was their large formats. It took almost 20 years for Indigo and HP to move from SRA3 format to the first B2 presses, but Landa plans to have B1 from the start.

‘All digital printing technologies started in the office, and they have evolved from A4 to A3 to B2,’ he said. ‘Which is terrific and from a digital printing point of view, a tremendous achievement. But viewed from a mainstream printing standpoint, all the heavy lifting is done by B1 sized presses.

‘What the industry needs is B1 sizes, at over 10,000 sheets per hour, with the quality of offset and more important than anything else, the economics of offset. The reason people stood in line to see our machines is not because of the print quality, but the promise of the ability to make money from the jobs they’ve already got and the customers they’ve already got, which they can’t do today.

‘In order to be in the mainstream, that is the other 98%, you’ve got to have the same speed, quality and costs as offset, and you’ve got to be able to print on the same stocks as the commercial printer already prints on. The reason is that the printer doesn’t choose the stock, the customer chooses the stock. Nobody is going to force the customer to choose from a half dozen specially coated papers. We think for a digital press to succeed it will have to provide all of these.’

For years, press run lengths have been falling, he pointed out. ‘Printers can make money from long runs, but customers are pushing for shorter and shorter runs. Most jobs are already 5000 sheets or less.

‘An offset printer has fixed costs per job, for setup and plates and so on. For long jobs this is insignificant. For short runs of 1000, 4000 pages, the cost per page goes higher. So he has to pass that on to his customers. But they aren’t prepared to pay more for shorter runs than longer runs. The commercial printer should say ‘I’ll do your long jobs but for short jobs you go somewhere else, because I only do the profitable jobs.’ But he won’t do that, because he might not get the customer back.

So he has to do the short jobs, and these are becoming most of the jobs. And he just can’t make money with that.

‘That is the real reason for the crisis in the industry. It’s not the internet or tablet threat. It may threaten books and newspapers, but they are $80 billion out of an $800 billion industry and the rest of it is not going away. Not in our lifetime. Commercial printing is ever so slightly declining in the developed world, but in the developing world it’s growing. In the USA alone there are 30,000 magazine titles. Most have distributions below 5000 copies.

‘Packaging is never going to be replaced either. It’s growing in the west because families are getting smaller. In China, it’s growing faster than GDP, because when a farmer moves from the country to the town, instead of buying food in a market he buys it in a supermarket.’

 

Medium run dilemma

Existing digital print processes do not fully address the new trend to short runs, he claimed. ‘Digital printing is fantastic for run lengths of one to a few hundred or thousand perhaps. Take digital photo albums. If you want three or four wedding albums you don’t mind paying $50 each. But if you want 1000 or 2000to distribute to every member of your church or club, there’s nobody will pay $50 each.

Digital print is fantastic for niche jobs and short runs, but not for long runs. That’s where we come in. Run lengths of one to thousands of B1 sheets. The crossover point will rise from 5000 to 10,000 up to 20,000 as volume brings the cost of our ink down.

‘The fundamentals of our printing process will enable us to get to very long run lengths. That’s what we mean when we say mainstream commercial printing. Over time as volumes increase we’ll be able to reduce the cost of ink dramatically.’

Other digital print processes will not be able to address this higher volume emerging market, he claimed. ‘We do not see even on the horizon a technology that can challenge Nanography for mainstream commercial printing. If someone knows of one please tell me what it is. It won’t be electrophotography. I abandoned electrophotography for a reason, and that’s because it is just never going to have the economics to make it viable for commercial printing. It won’t be inkjet, because inkjet can’t print higher ink coverable, it can’t print on uncoated stock, it’s just not a viable technology for mainstream commercial printing.’

It is worth noting that rival developers do not necessarily agree with this viewpoint.

Canon/Océ and Xeikon in particular see considerable speed and quality potential with liquid toner electrophotography, and are introducing brand new presses for packaging and document printing respectively. The Océ InfiniStream liquid toner carton press is web fed but in effect B1 format. It is only half the speed of the Landa S10FC, but the first customer site has been operating since last year.

 

Clicks for ink

Like HP Indigos, Landa presses will have a click rate model, Mr Landa said. ‘Click charges were invented by Xerox in the 60s,’ he stated. ‘We did it for Indigo and everyone said they’d hate it. But no, Indigo customers say they like it. The cost of plates and so on has gone for digital printers, so all the cost is in the ink.

‘If you have to pay for the ink you don’t know how to bid for the job without knowing the area. With a click charge, there’s the certainty of the cost, so you know what to charge. We act like an insurance company. We know what the averages are, we don’t care if the customer does a higher coverage here, a lower coverage there, we can price it so it works for everyone.’

Although Landa intends to license its printing process out (Heidelberg, Komori and Roland Sheetfed have signed up to make presses), all the ink for all Nanographic presses will be made in Landa factories. Some commentators are uneasy at the prospect of a monopoly supplier, but Mr Landa dismisses their fears. ‘We charge a click rate and you will get the ink for free. So there’s no market for third party ink.’

So, big claims indeed for a press that has not reached any printers yet, but Mr Landa has delivered the goods before with Indigo. If you missed him at drupa, it is worth a trip to Ipex to check out how convincing his next venture might be.