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I remember the first time I saw digital colour print. It was at Ipex in 1994, and I was royally entertained by the presentations. However, the only drawback was the overblown hype proclaiming the end of conventional print that had little bearing on reality. Despite initial detractors, digital print has made a huge impact on the industry, from mailing to short-run print-on-demand; it now accounts for some 15% by value (less by volume) of the whole print market. Most digital production uses electrophotographic technology and laser toner printing. While quality and reliability have improved greatly, and it is more affordable, there has been little in the way of development in format and range of materials. This has held back the growth of digital and its future depends on improvements in format, productivity, economics and quality.

Inkjet technology has been steadily developing with Kodak’s VersaMark, Agfa’s Dotrix and the Screen Truepress Jet520 (rebadged as the Infoprint 5000) taking a growing share of direct mail and colour transpromotional, books and newspapers. These will be joined by a few more models at Drupa, engendering a similar excitement with concept machines from Seiko-Epson, Fujifilm, Kodak and HP. The change is that many of these firm’s machines are being firmly positioned as real competition to offset.

Hewlett-Packard gave me the chance to explore the launch of their inkjet web press that is creating significant waves. With $104bn (£50bn) annual sales – $28bn in print and imaging – HP is the biggest supplier to the printing industry. Several years ago, it spent $1.4bn on scalable inkjet heads, using thermal pulsing that can be used in desktop and industrial print engines. Thermal heads are relatively simple compared to some piezo models and, with their economies of scale, HP will make sure the unit costs are low.

Alternative approach
HP talks about providing a solution to let printers prosper by providing technology to earn an attractive return on investment for high-volume digital. It believes the quality demanded by brands and commercial printers was not satisfied by the available inkjet equipment and the market had significant pent up demand that could not be accommodated economically. HP’s strategy thinks about printing differently to many digital equipment suppliers. Instead of following a model that works out how to maximise the revenue to the supplier, the company has determined what would be compelling for printers and tried to provide the solution.

HP’s new press is a 30in wide web, running at 400 feet per minute through two engines. This works out at 2,600 A4 pages per minute, faster than a B1 press (even a perfector, depending on the run length). It has a monthly duty cycle of 70m pages – a straight sheetfed press would take 31 days of continuous printing at 12,000sph with no makereadies to print the same volume.

Ink innovations
The system uses pigmented inks with a clever twist to get over the issues of water-based inks and uncoated paper. There is an ingenious mechanism of pre-printing an ink binder onto the surface of the paper that stops ink spread and penetration leaving pigment on the surface for clean, bright sharp results (I should have thought of that). The press contains 140 of the 4.25 width, 600dpi thermal heads, each with 10,520 nozzles providing built-in redundancy and imaging consistency.

It is the economics that HP hopes will convince printers. The list price is less than $2.5m (dollars mean good news for UK buyers) and a consumable cost of just 0.5p for a colour page and less than 0.1p for a mono page. The company wants to lay down the gauntlet to offset and take a significant share of the conventional print market, and believes the combination of quality, speed and economics will be compelling for many printers to take the step into high volume digital.

But it is not just HP. Kodak is launching its Stream inkjet press that it calls ‘offset class’, also competitive in terms of quality, speed and costs. So, take a good look at inkjet at Drupa this year and see what it might do for your business and make up your mind objectively.

Sean Smyth is an independent ‘techie’ providing support for organisations looking to apply technology. He can be contacted at sean.smyth@dsl.pipex.com