For every continuous-feed digital engine out there, there is a series of high-tech modules hooked up before the feeder and after the delivery. The quality of the job that lands in a customer’s lap, be it a bank statement, fancy piece of direct mail or transpromo marketing item, is often down to the post-press equipment.
This is the domain of Hunkeler, a manufacturer that also hosts its own trade show every two years in Switzerland. The vendor is platform-agnostic – you might find Hunkeler gear on a line from Océ, Ricoh InfoPrint, Kodak or any other continuous-feed supplier. It is this agnostic ethos that has led to the existence of Hunkeler’s own trade show, Innovation Days, held during the European winter in the picturesque Swiss city of Lucerne.
At the 2013 Innovation Days, the key trend was expanding the applications for high-speed continuous feed printing. Historically the trade show has been about transactional and high-volume DM applications. These were the core markets served by the continuous-feed engines that needed Hunkeler’s unwinders, rewinders and roll-fed finishing lines.
That has changed. Continuous-feed digital has migrated from toner to inkjet and monochrome to colour. When the technology first emerged, the primary focus was ‘white paper’ solutions, doing away with B&W overprinting of litho shells and instead starting with a blank reel and printing colour and the text in one pass. Now vendors are looking for the next addressable applications. The consensus is they are “graphic arts”.
“My definition of graphic arts is publishing and some direct mail – the stuff that to date has been litho due to more image content and the demand for higher quality,” says Peter Wolff, Canon Europe head of commercial printing.
In publishing, the remit for continuous-feed inkjet is set to expand beyond books, to magazines and catalogues, he adds.
HP’s Paul Randall agrees. The Indigo and inkjet web press expert says HP is working with magazine publishers in the US, including Hearst’s Popular Mechanics.
“It is much easier in the US because of the dominance of subscription over newsstand, which means there is more data on the reader,” says Randall.
Another market is catalogues. At the show, Xerox was showing an example that customer CWN Druck of Germany produced for Bon Prix – a catalogue with 14 million customers across Europe.
The engines that produce these new applications are fantastic pieces of kit, but the really interesting part is the workflow and consumables. Canon’s Wolff says: “What the market needs now is not wider and faster devices. Our challenges are ink and paper. Developments of those two are essential to improve existing applications and to open up the new ones.
“There needs to be steps taken in inks, but I feel the bigger gains are to be made in paper. When we lose a deal, it’s due to the paper. It’s not that we lose a deal to a rival inkjet vendor, it’s that a printer chooses not to transfer the application from offset – yet.”
There are signs the paper issues are being resolved, especially around lower prices and more choice.
“Our strategy was always to trust in the development capabilities of the mills,” says Wolff. “In the past three or four years, the range of available papers has increased by a factor of 10 and there has been a significant movement in price.”
At Drupa 2008, these stocks were €1,700-1,800 per tonne. Now there are better stocks for €900 per tonne. The paper industry has made big steps. Wolff says: “As for future development, I’m very confident. There is more interest from the paper companies. Offset volumes are declining faster than they anticipated, which forces them to act."
Paper is still an issue
Some say paper remains a challenge. “The market has a lack of stocks, which is inhibiting new applications,” says Bernhard Cantzler, business development manager for high-speed inkjet at Mondi. The paper maker is taking steps to address this. Mondi is also looking at another big inhibitor of inkjet applications: consumables costs, particularly ink.
“On jobs with areas of high coverage, ink is much more expensive than the paper, and pigment inks are more expensive still,” says Cantzler.
“On our DNS Enhanced Color Inkjet paper, the results with dye ink look as good as pigment ink without the 30-40% price premium. This addresses applications that weren’t cost-effective before.”
Mills such as CVG, Mitsubishi, Mondi, Sappi and Zeigler and equipment vendors like Canon are taking the route of inkjet stocks optimised at the mill. But other vendors, notably Kodak, are taking the approach of offering optimisation on press.
“Those firms talking about mill-treated stock over inline aren’t talking about the applications to replace offset, which need both image quality and economics,” says Will Mansfield, Kodak’s worldwide director of marketing for inkjet solutions.
“We have one client that is saving $10,000 per week since switching to offset stocks. That gives you an idea of the savings possible, as well as the volumes that they are producing,” says Mansfield.
A key reason that clients outside mainland Europe and North America opt to treat their paper inline is due to a lack of locally produced inkjet grades.
“Markets are price-sensitive,” says Mansfield. “Inkjet papers are already premium-priced products, so importing them is not practical. Optimisation is an attractive option.”
The ink solution
KBA has a different take with its polymer inks, shown for the first time at the trade show. The chemicals that keep the ink attached to the surface of the stock are in the ink rather a coating for the paper. This can be done at the mill or on press.
Xerox is taking another way with its waterless inkjet CiPress, which enables it to use standard litho stocks without the need for treatment at the mill or on-press. Because the CiPress can work with very lightweight papers, it may open up applications that no other inkjet technology can tackle. At Innovation Days, Xerox showed further steps in this direction.
“We’ve now gone down to 29gsm, and as far as we’re aware, no other inkjet goes down to anything that low,” says Jo Oliphant, Xerox Europe’s continuous-feed marketing manager.
At Drupa, Xerox was demonstrating 49gsm; going down to 29gsm represents significant cost savings. Applications for ultra lightweight stocks include high-pagination catalogues and mail in nations with low postal weight thresholds. “With thin stock, you can have more sides to get your message across and still qualify for the cheapest mailing,” says Oliphant.
Paper is only one consumable whose cost is holding back new applications; the other issue is inks. Again, there is progress.
Richard Lloyd, commercial print solutions offering manager at Ricoh, says: “We are looking at ways to reduce customers’ ink costs. We appreciate the need to make higher-coverage jobs more cost-effective.”
Manufacturers are reformulating inks to cut costs. Another opportunity savings comes from economies of scale – as manufacturing volumes increase, it will result in lower prices. There is also an expectation that third-party inks will become available, which will increase competition and lower the prices.
Another way to control ink costs is by using software to reduce the amount of ink needed. This work by colour profiling to remove cyan, magenta and yellow and replace them with black – a triple whammy of improved quality, colour consistency and lower cost. Not only does less ink means lower costs, it also means less heat is needed for drying, reducing energy costs.
Smart software
Software also plays a role in opening up new applications for continuous-feed inkjet. In books, on-demand digital printing enables smaller volumes and more value per job. But that effectively means more pre-press, production and management information systems to reduce the file handling cost.
Ricoh has launched its Cadence system to enable that. It is built on the vendor’s transactional workflow. At its heart, it is a track-and-trace tool.
“It enables production efficiency – batching of similar products to ensure the most efficient production by format, binding style and colour content. You put all the jobs into a big data bucket and match them up with similar jobs, while keeping track of where they all are when you need to bring the order together,” says Ricoh’s Lloyd.
There were no groundbreaking hardware announcements at Hunkeler Innovation Days, but there were incremental improvements to support the broader application ranges. Most notably drying systems to enable higher ink coverage and glossy stocks.
The biggest launch was Kodak’s enhanced Prosper 5000, the XLi.
“With the XLi, glossy paper is a key part of the play,” says Kodak vice-president of digital and functional printing Eric Owen. “That is enabled by the new paper path, which enables us to run more gloss paper stocks and to run them faster for a larger application range. It has enabled a migration of toner-based on-demand books to inkjet. It offers the quality of toner at a tenth of the cost.”
That is a new twist on digital substitution – a lower-cost, higher-volume digital process supplanting another digital technology.
As part of its push into publications, Ricoh showed a new dryer for the InfoPrint 5000 designed to handle higher ink coverage and glossy stocks. Significantly it is Ricoh’s own development and not available via Screen, who makes the base press. It is also retrofittable, opening up new applications for a minimal cost.
And what of Hunkeler, the company that makes this event happen? Its next-generation products give a hint of the next market to fall to high-speed continuous-feed digital. In Lucerne, it previewed its POPP8 generation of unwinders and rewinders previewed. They go wider, faster and heavier.
Faster – at 300 metres per minute – points to growing volumes and presses with higher throughput. Wider and heavier point to packaging. The devices can handle heavier reels of 1,500kg, with a diameter of 1,370mm and stock weights up to 350gsm. This all points to packaging. The 762mm width of the POPP8, although useful for publishing ,points towards packaging applications, where a wider web makes for much more effective layouts on the substrate, making significant savings to unit costs.
The vendors are clear on a strategy of expanding the applications for their digital machines. There is evidence they are taking a holistic view toward engines, inks, substrates and software. The issue remains how customers will respond.
The businesses that prosper will combine market knowledge with practical production skills and an understanding of the tools at hand. There are risks and rewards for printers who have the technology or the market knowledge needed. The race is on to see where the winners will come from.
Maximising mono
At Hunkeler Innovation Days, most vendors were focused on colour and the new graphic arts applications. But one exhibitors went back to the show’s roots: monochrome, albeit with an inkjet twist. Graph-Tech was showing the Mono-Cube, a drop-in replacement for mono toner machines, which was previewed at Drupa.
“We believe the rush to colour in the continuous-feed market has been too much too soon, with 40-80% of the work on colour devices actually mono,” says Bryan Palphreyman, inkjet commercial director at the Swiss firm.
“There are still a lot of mono pages out there that won’t ever go away completely.”
The Mono-Cube has a minimum volume of 3-4 million pages per month, although the firm expects most to produce 7-8 million. It is available in four widths from 17.5 to 30 inches and speeds from 75-150 metres per minute, with pricing from £250,000 ($370,000). The firm claims that the total cost of ownership is 30-50% of toner, with no click, and no service or maintenance charges.
“The Mono-Cube will be something we are targeting at the utilities and volume DM houses as a toner replacement,” says Matt Johnson of Graph-Tech’s Australian agent Trimatt Systems “Also for the Australian market, it is easy to service and maintain by the printer themselves.”
Aussie perspective: Rodney Frost
I attended the Hunkeler Innovation Days show in Switzerland in February. It was my first time at the show and I was not disappointed.
Even though I was at Drupa, a trip to the Hunkeler show was still worthwhile, and not just for a trip up the world’s steepest cogwheel railway. This was the absolute latest cutting edge gear. I found that there were more R&D people, service technicians and senior management at Lucerne whereas Drupa was more the sales and new business people with no risk in what was exhibited.
Hunkeler is purely innovation and a cutting-edge focus on what is coming. The footprint is much smaller than that of Ipex or Drupa. My takeaway from the show was that we are seeing the trend toward more graphically intense direct mail, moving away from core transactional and simple direct mail applications.
I was impressed by the new Xeikon security features. I hadn’t heard about these before. The technology uses taggant marked spot colour toner. According to Xeikon, taggants are microscopic chemical markers that can be added to the substrate or the toner, to allow various forms of verification. Taggants are invisible to the human eye and can only be detected by special readers.
All the inkjet technologies are coming along quickly. I found it interesting the Xerox has developed the toner-based Color 8250, which looks like a dumbed-down iGen to target the transpromo market against the inkjets.
Not all the inkjet technology is quite there yet. One major vendor had to put a coater inline because the output was scuffing in your hands. Apparently they would have needed four more dryers to get the result they needed, while the heat generated in between each head is also putting a lot of stress on the substrate.
I saw the Hunkeler Primer Coater Module PC7. This either pre-coats unprinted paper before the printing process or post-coats printed webs. It allows the use of ordinary offset papers. The system will be great if they can get it working inline with the inkjets over coming months.
Hunkeler’s laser cutting machine is phenomenal. It runs at 150 metres per minute and the CO2 laser enables dynamic die-less cutting, punching and perforating for things like DM, coupons and security print. Hopefully they can add personalisation to that too.
The photobook market is definitely getting looked after. I noticed a piece of equipment from Swiss company Imaging Solutions called the FastBlock. This line automatically performs the required work steps of cutting, creasing, folding, pressing and gluing to create a finished book block from a roll.
Rodney Frost is the chief executive of Sydney-based trade supplier Cheque-Mates
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