It is 1993. Whitney Houston's I Will Always Love You has spent ten weeks at the top of the charts and a schooner could be bought for small change. There is also the minor matter of a revolution in global communications taking hold.
Although there are fewer than 650 websites on the entire internet, Mosaic, the browser credited with popularising the World Wide Web, has been released. And in September, at the Ipex ’93 trade show at Birmingham’s NEC, a revolution in print was also underway.
Twenty years ago, Indigo launched its E-Print 1000 with the sort of pizazz we’ve now come to expect from founder Benny Landa. And, in a more low-key corner of the show, Xeikon’s DCP-1 was shown under the Chromapress 32i banner by Agfa, one of the original investors in Xeikon.
“The introduction of the Indigo and Xeikon digital print technologies at Ipex ‘93 was a big deal,” recalls Garry Muratore, GMG product manager at Kayell Australia, who at that time had a long-running marketing role with Agfa in Australia. “The Indigo and Xeikon were a milestone that changed our industry radically. Here was a technology that enabled new applications, variable data, versioning, distribute and print just to name a few. In the following five years, the print industry probably changed more than it had in the previous 400.”
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Agfa was an OEM partner of Xeikon and was the first company to commercialise the technology under the name of Chromapress. At Agfa, Muratore was responsible for the product introduction here in Australia. “Whilst Indigo heavily promoted electro-ink, Xeikon utilised dry toners that where manufactured by Agfa. At the time, much of the competitive banter was centred around ink versus toner, but ultimately both technologies worked and worked well, and the real story was about what these amazing machines were capable of.”
It was the beginning of commercial colour digital printing as we know it, although some would argue that the revolution really began some time before this. Mark Stephenson, digital solutions sales manager at Fujifilm, says: "I would start in 1985 with the Apple LaserWriter. That started the trend that has made the printing industry what it is today – print it yourself."
Pre-1993 there was of course also a lot of black-and-white digital printing. However, it was the ability to print in full colour without the need for printing plates and all the associated costs of conventional printing that would prove truly revolutionary.
As such, another pre-1993 landmark came in 1987 when Canon launched the CLC-1, its first colour laser copier. This product provided a taste of what was to come in terms of the appetite for short-run, affordable colour.
“I recall clearly when Canon introduced their first digital colour printer here in Australia,” says David Procter, general manager, production printing, at Konica Minolta Australia. “The CLC1, $70,000 for the engine, $70,000 for the RIP, 70c a copy for A4 and toner, and maybe one page per minute. Suddenly we had colour copy shops opening everywhere producing transfers on T-shirts and coffee mugs. Some may even remember an industry personality being bailed up by A Current Affair over digital colour printing.
“Konica Minolta dipped its toes into the water ten-plus years ago with the 8050 — and that was a learning curve for us. Seven years ago, we introduced the bizhub C6500, competitively priced, full of features and provided a genuine alternative to what was then available,” says Procter.
“Time has moved on. There are now several alternatives providing these solutions and the technology is well accepted. For the same as ten years ago, you now get something 100 times faster, unbelievably better quality and less than 10% of the cost to run. Where will we be in another 20 years?”
Even direct imaging ‘digital’ presses, such as Heidelberg’s GTO DI, launched in 1991, still needed plates and couldn’t produce variable data.
Which is why Ipex ’93, and the Indigo and Xeikon launches, are viewed as setting the stage for what was to follow. At the time a PrintWeek headline stated that the Indigo E-Print 1000, which could print 1,000 four-colour duplex A4 pages per hour, was a "hot Ipex sensation".
"At the press launch the company photographed a model in front of the audience using a Sony digital camera, and some five minutes later her picture was printed up, full-colour, to the amazement of the stunned audience," we reported.
Indigo created a frenzy, with the shows in its relatively small theatre quickly booked up, and visitors blocking the aisles as they tried to catch a glimpse of the E-Print press located on the outside of the stand.
Recalling those events, Benny Landa says: "They literally made us show them that the sheets weren’t pre-printed, it was that shocking. Nowadays, a run length of one is normal. The whole idea back then was an oxymoron."
Muratore recalls: “At Agfa we initially had limited access to Xeikon engines so the worldwide roll-out of Chromapress was staged, first in Europe, then the States and finally the rest of the world. I was able to attend launch events around the world which included the commercial launch at Drupa ‘95. One has to remember that although both Indigo and Xeikon technologies debuted two years earlier at Ipex, it was nothing more that a technologies demonstration, with commercial installations coming much later. That being so, Drupa ‘95 was when the marketing went into overdrive.
“Everyone will no doubt remember the polished performance of Benny Landa at Drupa ’95, however, over on the Agfa stand, we planned similar. To show the potential of the distribute-and-print application, we had a Chromapress set up in Tokyo and via a video link the Drupa crowd could see the print job being produced simultaneously in both locations. This was a big deal when you consider it was ten years prior to Skype and such video connections were rare and expensive. Our "Landa" was to be digital print product manager Paul Willems, a charismatic Belgian who spoke five languages and lived and breathed digital print. The problem was Paul, who had been working months on end without a break leading up to Drupa, got sick, lost his voice and ended up hospitalised and never made the show. Regardless the first international orders came flooding in.”
In Australia, the wait for the first Chromapress dragged on to July 1996. Says Muratore: “I was charged with creating two launch events — in both Melbourne and Sydney. Having access to a Chromapress three months in advance of the event allowed us to do several things, the critical factor being to create samples and test jobs for potential customers and produce all of our promotional material for the launch on the unit. This included different versions of brochures, short targeted runs and personalised invitations to the event.”
The launches were held at the Melbourne Convention Centre and Sydney's Randwick Racecourse. “We created a half-day event which was seminar-style and included partners such as Adobe and Apple. Apple even sent their VP of global sales out from Cupertino to attend. The Melbourne event occurred on a record day of low temperatures, meaning that attendees had to make their way to the event in around two-degree weather. We were concerned that this may affect the turnout. It didn't, with over 700 turning up in Melbourne and 400 in Sydney. To this day, other than trade shows and the print awards, these two events were the biggest ever seen by our industry. We even had mainstream media cover the event with a half-page story in The Australian.”
Xeikon’s former sales director Greg Neesham, now semi-retired, was also there at the very beginning and has witnessed the many twists and turns in the Xeikon story. "At the time it was just us and Indigo. I did believe it was a change period and thought some day everything’s going to be digital. People were laughing at me," he recalls.
While the excitement about the potential for digital colour printing was immense, it took rather longer than anticipated to really take off commercially.
The early machines were flakey to say the least, and there was a lack of demand from print buyers, who at that point were either unaware of the possibilities or not geared up to take advantage of them. And while it was technically possible to vary every page at full press speed, the availability of suitable systems to handle that amount of data was some way off.
As Landa himself admits, "the first machines were not really reliable enough and there was no pull from the market".
The first two Indigo E-Print 1000s in Australia were installed in the mid-1990s at WYSIWYG Design in the Sydney CBD , now 29Design in St Leonards. (See box). The first two Indigo E-Print 1000s in Europe were installed by Rexam Digital Imaging (formerly The Eastern Press) in 1994. The manager of the facility at the time was Andy Rae, who is now senior vice-president of equipment at Heidelberg USA.
"We had two E-Prints and a full-time service technician from Indigo; they really were too unreliable at the time to offer on-demand print. Ripping speeds were very slow then, and as we had to take native files to check them we had no idea how long they would take. I remember one guy’s CorelDraw file of one A3 page took over two hours to rip, while he waited!" recalls Rae.
Muratore harks back to some early Chromapress sales. “In 1996, with two sales under our belt, we went about the task of helping our customers create markets for digital print. In fact that was the greater challenge than anything technical. I used to say ‘If God created the world in seven days, in digital print we were only at morning tea of day one’. I soon learned that customers who had a marketing focus achieved the greatest success, whilst customers with a pure sales focus showed results in the other direction.
“One of the stranger jobs I had to do was New Year's Eve 1999. The Chromapress was full of microprocessors and CPUs and our R&D team were unsure what (if anything) would happen in regards to the Y2K bug. As Melbourne had the closest machine to the international date line, we had to organise to come and print a job immediately after midnight and send a report to a team who were on standby in Europe. As expected, the machine performed faultlessly.
“By 2000 we had around six machines installed and running well. Unfortunately it was at this point in time that Agfa's board ran out of patience and decided to get out of digital print, transferring staff, technology and the toner plant to Xeikon, who went on to make it the great success it is today,” says Muratore.
It wasn’t until 1998 that digital print really started to take off in earnest, and the developments have come thick and fast since (as our timeline shows).
In a PrintWeek interview that year, in response to accusations that Heidelberg was becoming too large and powerful, Heidelberg’s then-chief executive Hartmut Mehdorn compared the size of Heidelberg to giants such as Xerox, saying: "Hewlett-Packard, Canon and Xerox are the real competition, that’s where the real battle is coming."
Today, he would of course need to add Konica Minolta, Epson and Heidelberg’s current digital partner Ricoh to that list.
And although there have been some digital dead-ends along the way, today there is plenty of digital print technology that is robust and reliable, and it’s spreading its bits and bytes into all areas of print.
InfoTrends estimates that HP Indigo and Xeikon alone have sold almost 5,000 devices between them over the past two decades in Europe, and says that, overall, one trillion pages a year are now printed digitally.
"It is not the pure growth market it once was, but we are still seeing colour growth. And the next new kid on the block is inkjet, which is growing a lot – 30% volume growth year-on-year," says director Ralf Schlözer.
Digital has also helped – or perhaps compelled – litho to improve. Would the ultra-efficient litho web-to-print operations exist if it hadn’t been for the impetus created by digital print? SmithersPira consultant Sean Smyth thinks not. "The whole digital adoption has actually pushed analogue production forward. Print is much cheaper, better quality and more relevant now than it ever has been," he asserts.
DIGITAL MEMORIES
Jeff Jacobson, president, Global Graphic Communications, Xerox
"It is amazing to think 20 years have passed since the introduction of digital printing technology, and yet it is difficult to imagine our industry without it. Clearly digital has transformed print in ways no one could have expected in 1993. I have been privileged to watch this change from different perspectives – from my days at Kodak Polychrome Graphics, Kodak, Presstek – and now at Xerox, where we live and breathe digital. Digital and offset have found ways to co-exist, and that’s good for print service providers who have made significant technology investments. We all know there are applications that are more appropriate for digital and vice versa. What’s interesting now is watching digital co-exist with today’s multimedia marketing campaigns. Print’s questionable survival has been replaced with renewed focus on its relevance. That’s all beneficial to the industry and, more importantly, demonstrates the profound impact of digital printing. What do the next 20 years have in store? I predict more of the same. Print will continue to evolve and respond to the requirements of a challenging marketplace. To do so it needs to be smart, intuitive and inspiring – and digital printing will make that all possible."
Albert Tedja, owner, 29 Design, Sydney. Tedja was a business partner of Michael Tan at the former WYSIWYG Design, the first Indigo installation site in Australia):
“We bought two machines of the Indigo E-Print 1000, which came on board in the mid-1990s. It was very exciting because it was a considerable advance on the Canon CLCs of the time. We’d begun in 1987 and before the Indigos we just had the CLCs and a dye-sub printer for our digital colour work. We could now print short and not-so-short runs of business cards and brochures on 300gsm stock. We didn’t do variable printing in those days. There were limitations. You could print double-sided, but not in one pass. And the presses had some teething problems. We were located on Sussex Street, with the then Indigo agency ODIS [On Demand Imaging Systems] right behind us, so it wasn’t an issue for them to keep visiting every time there was a problem. It’s a far cry from today’s machines. As 29 Design in St Leonards, we’re still an Indigo customer – our latest press is an HP Indigo 5000 [from present-day distributor Currie].”
Michael Schulz, director, SOS Print & Media, Sydney:
“We started in digital colour with the CLC 500, manual duplexing, ‘print’ quality.
We had to change a lot of oil bottles. The 550 model could duplex on some stocks, what a relief. It could also produce transparencies, albeit with interleaving. But the first colour printer we really used in volume was the Xerox DocuColor 4040. Our marketing sold it as a press, and we ran it until it broke. A speed of 2,400 pages per hour meant that we could produce colour books and short runs, that would have been offset. Our current colour machine runs 2,400 pages per minute.”
Jennifer Baile, executive sales manager of Fuji Xerox, and former co-owner of Print Direct, South Melbourne:
“At Print Direct, we looked at the Indigo but ended up going with the Heidelberg Quickmaster QMDI. The Indigo would have needed an offset press operator to drive it and we wanted to explore other options. The Direct Imaging (DI) process on the QMDI was distinctive as it lasered the images onto the plates while they were on the press. Print Direct (1991-2005) was 100% digital, with a Xerox DocuColor 6060 and a DocuTech 135, but we wanted to expand into offset, and the QMDI took us into the offset world. After the QMDI, we got a five-colour Speedmaster CPT and grew our offset business. We were one of the first Australian businesses to go from digital into offset, rather than vice versa.”
Mason Thomas, production manager,, Print City, Melbourne CBD:
Print City’s introduction to digital colour started with the Canon CLC-700.
The second- hand machine sat in our reception area – it was a lot smarter and cleaner than any of our other machines! We managed to impress many clients with the staggering speed of seven pages minute – seems ridiculous now, but that was cutting edge.
If that sounds bad, remember this was the optimal output of the machine. Each time it scanned a new page, there would be a scanning pass for cyan, then magenta, then… This process would often take 45 seconds, so the realistic output was more like three pages a minute.
At that speed, it boggles the mind to think we were ground breakers in the CBD. We would have major law firms send their staff down to sit beside the machine all day while we ran colour jobs for them, but that was cheaper than them buying the best office model on offer at the time.
Once it was clear that colour was here to stay, and more importantly, companies were prepared to pay a premium for it, the market moved quickly. We upgraded to a CLC 1000, then a Xerox 4040. Later we upgraded to a Xerox 2060, then added a second soon after. We now hold a DocuColor 8000 and a Color 800 Press.
Stephen Docherty, managing director, Bell & Bain
Bell & Bain has just installed the world’s first Fujifilm Jet Press 540W.
"I worked for J Thomson Colour Printers back then and I remember them getting a Xeikon in, I was trying to fold the print output and it was a nightmare – all the moisture had been taken out of the paper. Even up to six months ago I would have said digital isn’t quite there yet, but the Fuji press has made me think differently. Even so, for our type of work it’s not all going to go digital in the foreseeable future."
Sean Smyth, consultant, SmithersPira
Smyth was group technical director at Rexam when it installed Europe’s first Indigos in 1994.
"Most of the stories are true. The minimum order value was £19, but it turned out it cost £23 to raise an invoice. Part of the reason for the investment was to understand colour digital printing and the potential for security printing (almost none as the print was erasable) and also Rexam made some of the consumables over in the US. Anyway, it was a good learning curve as it allowed us to understand reality of operation, including maintenance and support needs, and the costs. Digital has been proven to work, and for some, to make good money. The next big things will be packaging and ‘industrial decoration’, including textiles. Just look at Xaar’s results."
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