Digital printing at drupa was all about inkjet – well almost. There were few surprises on the cutsheet toner presses, but it was not entirely barren of developments.

As expected Heidelberg has renamed the Linoprint presses it OEMs from Ricoh as the Versafire and announced the availability of an additional yellow toner for the Versafire C.

Xeikon unveiled the Trillium One, a web press using a high viscosity liquid toner technology that will start out printing at 60m/minute. The aim is high quality applications with the sort of high coverage pages that inkjet finds difficult. First deliveries begin next year.

Kodak announced the Nexpress Max, a new version of the established press, now with the ability to print a sheet that is 1219mm long and up to 610microns, suitable for the magical carton applications. The real advance will be a new imaging unit that delivers 310lpi equivalent quality using eight bit data, equating to what Kodak claims to be the highest data density in the industry. Colour sequence flexibility, closed loop response and optimisation technology to treat different page elements in separate ways.

In the meantime the existing Nexpress is enhanced with a new interface and opaque white toner options in the ZX3900. But even for Kodak, the digital story was primarily about inkjet printing. The company ran a Prosper press on its stand and also on that of Manroland Web Systems connected to a Foldline finishing unit. At Kodak similar Manroland Web Systems equipment shared duties with a Vits unit to sheet commercial quality work from the press.

Kodak’s stance is that the continuous inkjet technology it uses is suitable for all types of paper because the ink need not contain the humectants that drop on demand printheads need to ensure nozzles stay open. Nevertheless for top quality applications some priming is recommended.

Others tackle this issue in a range of ways, HP using priming coaters for high volume jobs on its PageWide T platform and a bonding agent jetted into place for less demanding work. The company introduced the much promoted HDNA printhead as a means of improving quality by firing lightweight droplets into the mix and thus improving gradations, flesh tones and so on by increasing the number of intermediate colours that can be printed. The new press was the PageWide T490 capable of printing at 200m/min and printing interior large format graphics as well as magazine and catalogue presses.

Both Xerox and Canon are opting for new ink technologies to solve the problem of water-based inks soaking into the media and leaving a lifeless image as a result. While neither explains how this is achieved, some kind of layer forming polymer will be included, much like a latex ink in wide format applications.

Canon’s approach is seen on the ImageStream 2400 which was printing a business magazine with a number of covers to appeal to separate market segments. Quality was on the face of it quite acceptable for this work.

Canon also showed a B2 inkjet press it calls Voyager. Little was known about what is still a concept machine other than it is aimed at photo quality applications and is being developed in Japan by the same team that works on the Pixma photo printers.

The Xerox approach to quality continuous feed printing is the Trivor 2400 a first inkjet web press created using Impika technology.

Xerox was demonstrating it with a mail order catalogue wrapped with personalised covers and a personalised centre section with an array of goods matching the buying profile of the target customer. This was surrounded by a conventional litho printed section.

The preprinted reel was fed into a Hunkeler unwind unit and into a Muller Martini Presto Digital to create the variable content products. While there was a perceptible difference in quality for those used to print, the question should be whether this is noticed by end customers. Catalogue companies will of course save through reducing postage and wastage associated with mailing multiple section catalogues containing products that most people would not be interested in.

Both Canon and Xerox also brought inkjet to sheetfed printing. Canon’s new B3 i300 uses Colour Grip technology to apply a priming coat to deliver a consistent surface in areas that will receive coloured ink.

The Xerox Brenva HD cutsheet inkjet with a new set of printheads and the FD ink will lift the print quality, close to if not better than iGen quality.

Screen is also putting its faith in ink technology, showing samples printed on its Truepress Jet 520HD using the NX ink. It becomes available in 2017, says Screen and, if the samples displayed at the show are representative, will be a stride towards litho quality. This is not a Ricoh ink says Screen, relevant because the same press is also sold by Ricoh as the VC60000.

Ricoh has sold close to 20 of these machines worldwide and is in favour of the priming and post coat approach to achieving litho-like quality. At drupa this was demonstrated on a range of colour books, from cookery and academic to photography that were very acceptable in terms of quality for this type of publication.

There was a web press on the Fujifilm stand, the current Jetpress 540W model, and an announcement that Fujifilm plans to produce a web press using the same Samba printheads that it uses on the sheetfed JetPress 720S press. This will be a new machine entirely, not an upgraded 540W, and will be introduced sometime next year.

Fujifilm’s main focus was on the B2 sheetfed machine, which with 70 installations is described as the leading B2 inkjet press in the market, although it has had little competition to date. The positioning of the press has shifted according to the feedback received from these installations. It is now seen as much as a litho press as a digital machine, taking short run litho jobs that are awkward to process on a conventional press and freeing up capacity to be used on longer run jobs. The quality is more than a match for litho, literally so as the inks can deliver a much wider gamut than litho inks, leading to applications to real estate work and art.

There is competition now from the AccurioJet KM-1, Konica Minolta’s B2 inkjet press, also sold as the Komori Impressia i29. There was a swarm of potential customers around this press at all times and enough orders to fill the factory for a year, but few hard announcements as yet. The press uses UV cured inks to side step the water issue and deliver perfectly dry sheets for further processing. Konica Minolta talks in terms of almost any application including some packaging – UV inks are problematic for food cartons – with the first beta site using it for same day turnaround short run work that his litho presses find difficult to cope with.

While visitors buzzed around the KM-1 like bees around a hive, few paid much attention to the KM-C on another part of the booth. This is a B1 format inkjet press that will be suitable for packaging work thanks to using water based inks. It was shown as a concept press to gather feedback as to market requirements for this type of machine.

It might have taken guidance from KBA which discussed such a machine, being developed with Xerox, but which was not at drupa. It is taking a modular approach to carton printing with the potential to place litho units, perhaps cold foiling, ahead of the flatbed inkjet section, and then further coating, die cutting and stripping processes behind the digital section. The Varijet 106, powered by Xerox, will be unveiled at open houses in Germany early next year.

Heidelberg will no doubt stage open houses for its Primefire 106 inkjet press as this nears a market launch. This B1 press dominated one end of the Heidelberg hall with a presentation that included robot arms swinging large flat display screens. It really did not need it. The Primefire 106 is in many respects an impressive beast. It takes the printing concept developed by Fujifilm for the Jetpress 720S and scaled it to suit B1 printing with extra Heidelberg engineering. This is evident in the system used to move the paper beneath the Samba print heads. It is a gripper led system rather than vacuum, but using a new style of gripped that does not crash into the inkjet heads.

Further enhancements include inspection systems that are used to divert sub quality sheets into a separate delivery pile. This is just the start and no guarantee that the final machine will share the configuration at the show. Heidelberg was not handing out sample sheets, at least not to casual visitors (or journalists), but was willing to provide close ups of reversed out 2pt text.

The only question is whether the rather stately 2,000sph that sheets of this quality are printed will deliver the ROI that prospective customers will require. A 5,000sph productivity mode is also promised.

This comes close to the 6,500sph that the Landa S10 press was running at. Once again Landa attracted the bulk of interest despite not yet being able to deliver a saleable press. There has been significant progress in four years and samples, containing flaws and without crop marks or control strips, were on hand to be taken away after demonstrations. The numbers reported for orders placed are once again staggering, €450m apparently. Those wanting to buy Landa machines will need to demonstrate patience.

The samples show the lift that is missing from much inkjet printing (the absence of water accounts for this) and were chosen for this effect. There were fewer with small type on hand, but this is still a pre-beta machine and needs further development. The first beta sites have been named, two in Germany, one in the US and in the UK for the web version of the press. If Landa came in for criticism for the delays since drupa 2012, few visitors seemed to mind.

The HP stand, the whole of Hall 17, was equally rammed with visitors. As well as the wide format and web fed inkjet technologies, the bulk of the hall was split between Indigo presses and a giant presentation screen and stage. Around were balconies for meeting rooms and to show applications produced by the machines below.

The star was the introduction of the biggest step for Indigo technology for a decade, the introduction of a new writing head that can address 1600 points per inch, double the current resolution. This will appear first on the B2 format Indigo 12000 once beta testing has been completed this year. The benefits will be a further step up in quality, like the HDNA head, to increase the number of gradation steps in quality critical areas of an image.

Both the 5000 and 7000 series machines gain new models and features imported from the machines above them in the range. This includes the ability to print fluorescent pink inks, with other colours sure to follow in time.

As elsewhere there was a strong emphasis on the suitability of Indigo printing for packaging applications: the 20000 for flexible and the 30000 for cartons. These sit alongside the well established label presses, enhanced by the Indigo 8000 which couples two print engines in tandem to increase throughput and which also includes other, potentially non digital, processes.

There were numerous models linked to inline and near line finishing options both for packaging and commercial print jobs like books or catalogues.

Digital printing itself is no longer enough. The digital press has become part of an end to end product creation workflow.

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