With
revenues exceeding a thousand billion yen Konica Minolta is not short of fire
power as it looks to commercial print to generate US$1bn, already some 12 per
cent of the business division's 65 per cebnt share of that 1000 billion Yen
comes from digital printing systems.

At its
press conference on the day before drupoa Konica Minolta announced an
impressive array of developments that it believes will propel it to centrestage
in commercial print, including new hardware, software and consumables.

Among the
new hardware is the bizhub PRO 1200 monochrome printer, which the company says
will produce up to three million pages a month. Also in monochrome it
highlighted its trio of new printers due to be released in Q4 2008; the bizhub
PRO 1600P, 2000P and 2500P, which at 250 pages a minute is, claims Konica
Minolta, the world's fastest single pass printing system.

On the
colour side, which is where Konica Minolta believes serious growth will occur
in the next three years, the company announced a new bizhub PRO C650hc, aimed
at the direct mail and photobooks market. Enhancements have also been made to
its other colour digital printing systems. However it was in nits toner
development that the company believes it will have the edge in colour digital
printing,, especially with the new High
Croma toner, which the company says is a dry toner that gives the same wide
colour gamut as inkjet or offset inks.

Konica
Minolta also announced the final piece in its Printgroove workflow management
software, known as PrintReady would be launched at the show.

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