We have heard about many vendors announcing their move into high-speed inkjet printing, or announcing enhanced or new products both in continuous feed and sheet fed operational modes.
Well the situation has now changed with the two companies that started the digital colour printing market announcing their next generation of products. The first of these was Xeikon who indicated their Quantum technology will be used in a new product, however this will only be shown as a concept product at drupa. I cannot say too much about this product yet but it will surprise many people to find its new technology has many similarities to that of HP Indigo. Quantum promises to bring the highest quality of electrophotographic technology and the use of standard substrates, with the speed of high-speed inkjet printing. The other company that made announcements was HP Indigo, and what a major announcement this was.
HP Indigo announced both its Series 4 platform and major upgrades to its established Series 3 platform. The new platform comprised three totally new presses and was an announcement that will significantly change the digital printing industry. The HP Indigo 10000, 20000 and 30000 presses are true B2 format presses. The HP Indigo 10000 is a sheetfed commercial printing press, the HP Indigo 20000 is a continuous feed flexible packaging and label press, and the HP Indigo 30000 is a sheetfed folding carton packaging press. These presses will open up a new market for B2 digital printing. I know that both Fujifilm and Screen have announced B2 format sheet fed inkjet presses, however I believe that the HP Indigo presses are better for the market and that they will rapidly take a dominant position in this space when they become available next year.
Why do I see the HP Indigo products as being so significant? They are true digital presses that are a logical extension of the HP Indigo line. They have up to seven colour operation as standard. They will run on a huge range of approved paper, board and film/foil/synthetic substrates. In the case of the sheetfed products the presses can run multiple substrates in the same job from up to five substrate feed stations. The HP Indigo 10000 press has duplex printing allowing for full personalisation to be carried out. The presses have been significantly automated for largely hands-off operation (a new thing for HP Indigo) with automatic colour registration on paper, colour calibration with a built in spectrophotometer, and full sheet checking of content against an original using the vision scanner. The presses can deliver to a stacker or re-reeler or to a range of inline finishing systems.
The print engine operates at a similar resolution to the existing HP Indigo engines and has a maximum image size of 75 x 53cm, a similar format and orientation to 75cm offset presses. The running speed in four-colour simplex mode of the HP 10000 and 30000 of 3,450 B2 sheet an hour. That means 13,800 A4 images an hour or 230 images a minute.
That however is not all. HP Indigo have introduced a new operational mode for these presses and also some other upgraded presses. This is EPM and this is printing in CMY only without using black. Up to now I have never seen this work as offset inks and digital toners tends to produce brown when combined instead of black. HP Indigo’s ink chemists and press engineers have managed to create a true black from the three colours. The quality is not quite as good as HP Indigo’s CMYK but it manages to handle almost 90 per cent of the colour gamut. It has some problems in heavy shadow and solid areas. I was however blown away by how good it was. The benefit is a 30 per cent speed increase up to 4,600 simplex colour sheets an hour (306 images/min). EPM mode if acceptable for a job therefore gives higher productivity at a lower running cost.
The presses have yet to go into beta testing and this should start later this year with deliveries probably around mid 2013. The price around $1.5m depending on configuration.
If you cannot wait that long HP Indigo is offering some new Series 3 presses and upgrades. The first is the HP Indigo 5600. This essentially is the HP Indigo 5500 but with OneShot technology. OneShot is the method of image transfer uses in the HP Indigo web presses where the full colour image is transferred from the blanket to the substrate in one operation rather than colour by colour. This means that this new press can now handle a wider range of special substrates including synthetic materials. Existing HP Indigo 5500 presses can have the OneShot upgrade. The HP Indigo 5600 also supports EPM raising its speed to 90 ppm in colour, and this is also available as an upgrade on the 5500.
Other new facilities for the Series 3 presses could be said to be bringing the functionality of these presses up to that of some of the competition, in particular the Kodak Nexpress. This include transparent ink for producing items like watermarking or patterns; invisible ink that can only be read under a UV scanner; raised print, somewhat like Nexpress Dimensional Print where layers of clear toner are built up in layers using up to 50 print passes. There is also a capability using a special blanket material and printing up to 250 layers in multiple passes than can do sheet embossing. All these functions enhance the functionality of the press.
It looks once again that two of the most interesting stands at drupa will come from Israel. HP Indigo being one, and the other from Indigo’s founder Benny Landa with his new company and his Nanographic
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