PictureWorks, based in Port Melbourne, installed the Canon DreamLabo 5000, which has the serial number #00001, after seeing the machine as a beta in Japan last year.
At a launch event at Canon’s Sydney HQ yesterday, PictureWorks managing director Andrew Smith said the device offered a level of quality that would help his firm escape the commodity trap.
Until now, PictureWorks had offered the default photobook standard – HP Indigo – thanks to its partnership with fellow Port Melbourne-based company On Demand Printing, which has one of the largest Indigo install bases in the country.
The DreamLabo 5000 has been installed at PictureWorks’ premises and will offer a premium service to customers who highly value photography.
“We want to be different in the marketplace. We want to exceed in quality. We want to reach out to new customers,” said Smith.
He told ProPrint he was well aware of the pros and cons of being such an early adopter. “We are proud to be first, together with the attendant risks and challenges that go with it and a fierce understanding that we have time to leverage what being first means.”
PictureWorks will market DreamLabo material under the banner of ‘HD Photobooks’, while offering Indigo output as ‘standard definition’.
The DreamLabo offers 2,400dpi resolution using a heavy-duty version of the inkjet printheads found on Canon’s range of Pixma desktop printers and ImagePrograf wide-format machines.
The roll-to-sheet device has capacity for four paper magazines and takes 80 seconds to produce a duplex 20pp, A4 photobook block in a single pass.
Canon hopes the machine will give it the kind of market position in image output that it already has in image capture. The corporation has had major success in the ‘pro-sumer’ photography market with its EOS line of top-end DSLR cameras.
Canon, which has 50,000 users in its ‘World of EOS’ community, said the number one reason people upgraded to a new camera was quality, while a survey of 3,000 EOS users showed they were willing to pay more for quality print.
Inkjet supremo Katsuichi Shimizu was visiting from Japan as a guest of honour at yesterday’s event. He told ProPrint the DreamLabo could shift the photo printing market away from decentralised mini labs and back to production hubs.
Shimizu, a Canon board member and chief executive of its inkjet products operation, said it was “very rare” for an Australian printer to be the first in the world with a new Canon production machine.
He said the DreamLabo 5000 was just the beginning of Canon’s push into inkjet production, and revealed future plans for a roll-to-roll version. This would increase the maximum speed, which is currently limited by the pace of the internal cutter.
Shimizu said a DreamLabo would cost around 50 million yen ($570,000). The pricing model comprises an outright machine cost, click charge and service fee, as well as a paper cost, as the machine only runs stocks supplied by Canon.
The Canon DreamLabo 5000 will be reviewed in the April issue of ProPrint.
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