All under one roof – the Océ facility showed more than 100 print applications involving every type of Canon digital press
Canon’s Production Printing Business Days at the Océ factory in Poing, Germany, provided an update on recent product progress, company strategy and a schedule for the Voyager “offset” inkjet press previewed at drupa last year.
Introducing the event, chief marketing officer & executive vice president, Production Printing Products Christian Unterberger reported that the Colorado 1640, the first device based on Canon’s new UVgel imaging technology unveiled in March had already received around 250 orders, with the same again expected by year-end. For context, he said that 6000 Arizona flatbed units had been ordered so far in 2017 and 100 VarioPrint i300 models, with Canon aiming to double the latter figure by year-end. The thousandth ColorStream unit was sold earlier this year to CA Print, a French transactional print specialist.
Jeppe Frandsen, executive vice-president Canon Europe explained how after a “best ever” drupa the company was shifting focus from mature markets sectors – such as cut-sheet toner-based presses – to growing ones which includes production inkjet printing as direct litho replacement and looking ahead to adjacent new areas such as 3D printing and packaging.
Part of the drive towards the last of these is via the Voyager inkjet press previewed at drupa 2016. Mr Frandsen said that the B2+ unit, which uses an indirect ink transfer method, will be available “mid-2018”. Its primary market is high volume photo printing and “super high-end commercial” where its quality will be close that of the Dream Labo 5000 dedicated photo inkjet printers but at 3000 sheets per hour, considerably more productive and able to print on a much wider range of substrates.
In a packaging configuration Voyager’s seven-colour capability can be put to use supporting additional primary colours such as green and orange for brand matching. Although the outsize B2 format at 788 x 600mm can support six-up A4 pages it won’t do very large cartons. It is suitable, however, for smaller high-value luxury items such as cosmetics where the print quality would be appropriate. Samples briefly on view showed impressive results with the standard CMYK ink set on a range of litho stocks, including uncoated and textured varieties.
The three-day customer event included a complex demonstration of how virtually every product in the Canon and Océ portfolios could be used together with various third-party hardware and software to create the elements of a fictitious beauty brand campaign, from personalised direct mail and transaction documents to look books and store-specific product samplers, to localised out-of-house advertising and retail environment and point-of-sale branding. From the hardware perspective, this involved the Arizona flatbed and Colorado roll-fed wide-format printers, varioPrint mono and colour and imagePress colour cut-sheet presses, and the ProStream and ColorStream continuous-feed inkjets, driven by various software components in Canon’s Prisma family.
