It is six years since high-speed webfed inkjet colour printing technology burst onto the print world at drupa 2008, and four years since most systems became commercially available. Screen, Ricoh, HP and Kodak – and lately Xerox – have all unfurled inkjet web solutions. With their ability to produce colour print and black-and-white at high speeds on a range of stocks, and without plates or makeready, and with variable data, this technology has revolutionised books, newspapers, DM, and transpromo.
Yet apart from the major mailhouses – Fuji Xerox Document Management Solutions (formerly Salmat), SEMA and ComputerShare — which pump out the mega transactional and transpromo jobs, take up hasn’t been quick. With around 20 systems now running in Australia, and the quality level increasing, does inkjet present a realistic opportunity for commercial offset printers? Some have waded in, and the advice they offer, based on their experiences, is worth noting.
Establish your supply chain
Despite a steady growth in certified inkjet web stocks, range and availability can sometimes be limited. The managing director and owner of a well known hybrid print enterprise, who asked not be identified, tells ProPrint that in his view there are not yet enough installations for a reliable supply chain, so hiccups in supplying coated, uncoated and precoated stocks and proprietary inks has made the technology unreliable as a business model. In turn, this has impeded wider adoption.
The company, an icon of offset printing in its locality, created a digital division and invested $4 million in a well known inkjet line four years ago, with a fixed-service contract. A major application is trade printing of paperback books, in shorter runs than on the company’s offset presses. Early on, the press also produced micro-runs of niche newspapers, but that market dwindled.
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Its managing director has faith in the inkjet hardware he bought and believes it is best-in- market, but describes press quality as “only 20 percent of the equation”, and admits he was blindsided by the consumables issues.
The business has made its own arrangements for buying paper stocks. Sometimes it is a case of laying hands on a reel of inkjet-treated stock as a stopgap to move a job out the door, says the managing director. On the bright side, transferring mono toner printed work to colour inkjet has proven cost effective, he says.
Take advantage of the speed
At Sydney’s SOS Print & Media, a mono Kodak Prosper 1000 came aboard in 2010 to compliment its two, five, six and ten-colour offset presses and six months ago the hybrid print enterprise added a Xerox 2800 colour line.
Michael Schulz, managing director of the high-profile 124-staff business, says the trick is to find work benefiting from speed, the drawcard of web inkjet. “If, for example, you’re printing 300 copies of a 400-page book at 250 copies per minute on your sheetfed machine and it takes 18 hours, and you put the job on a Prosper, at around 3,600 pages per minute, and it takes around two hours, that’s a huge difference.”
Output from the Prosper is transferred to an offline Hunkeler sheeter, then book blocks are set up, which differs from a sheetfed line, which runs two-up before cutting.
SOS’s sales force has canvassed publishers for book orders that have gone offshore, mainly to China, and Schulz reports some success in enticing these back with speed, low cost-per-page and quick turnarounds.
He acknowledges the range of inkjet stocks is still limited, compared to other digital technologies and offset, so forward planning and ordering is critical, particularly as you are ordering reels.
Do your homework
Paul Sanelli, business manager, inkjet, at Fuji Xerox Australia, identifies three areas for Australian high-speed inkjet: Essential/direct mail, books, and general commercial print applications. In direct mail, with the demise of VDP-overprinted offset ‘shells’, turnaround times have reduced, workflows simplified and equipment running costs have reduced.
He says that before deploying high-speed inkjet, printers must do extensive research to assess the integration with existing infrastructure and whether it will result in significant ROI. “Consider questions such as — what is the usual run length of our jobs? What content and types of documents do we specialise in? How much are turnaround times reduced if we transition to inkjet? Mapping the answers to these questions against the capabilities of the inkjet equipment will help assess its potential value to their business.”
Sanelli adds that it is important to have a workflow that minimises manual touch-points and effectively manages data composition, which in turn helps drive the inkjet press at full rated speed and ensures its continuous operation.
Then there’s the operators’ capabilities. “Key aspects include understanding the characteristics of paper in relation to applying ink , continuous or cut-sheet offset operation, prepress functions (colour management in particular) and mechanical or electromechanical equipment. All these are extremely valuable in ensuring the solution runs well and achieves greatest return.”
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At HP, Steve Donegal, director, strategic account program, Graphic Solution Business, likewise emphasises preparation before buying in web inkjet. “Customers coming from an offset environment who add the capabilities of the HP Inkjet Web Press are taking on an industrial-strength machine with industrial-strength capabilities. To take best advantage, they need to look for the work that lends itself to the things that digital inkjet can do for them which offset printing cannot do at all or cannot do easily.
“Use the offset capabilities for static long run jobs, but open the eyes of customers to the possibilities of digital inkjet! Customers who have done this have created new revenue streams and developed deeper relationships with their clients,” he says.
Whether you want to specialise in a single segment of the market or use the technology across various sectors depends on your business model, says Donegal. “There are many paths to success. It depends more on the type of company and its business model. There are companies around the world who successfully print only books. And there are companies who print books during one season and then print commercial work of all types during their less busy seasons. And still others print newspapers at times and general commercial work at others, Every combination is going on somewhere today.”
For Screen Australia managing director Peter Scott, speed is the differentiator with web inkjet. A sheetfed digital press such as Screen’s Truepress JetSX is capable of higher resolutions, printing on thicker and more varied stocks, but operates at around 110 A4 impressions a minute against over 3,000 on a web inkjet machine such as Screen’s Truepress Jet 520ZZ.
“The business model therefore is one of very high monthly volumes of A4 or equivalent full-colour impressions. This places high-volume inkjet web in the realms of transactional print, direct-mail, books, newspapers, lottery tickets and personalised, variable-data applications.”
Asked to nominate markets optimised for web inkjet, Scott says digital printing has delivered great economies to the book printing market, virtually eliminating the need for excessive inventory and speeding up time-to-market from weeks to days. “Typical print runs are below 1500 copies and very few if any digitally-printed books end up being re-pulped because they didn’t sell enough.”
“Transactional print is not sold as print because it supports another service but the ability to add variable marketing messages to an otherwise bland statement is generating extra revenue and bringing the print component cost down.”
Paul Whitehead, senior category specialist, Canon Print Production, believes the most important issue is to transition a business and its manufacturing process from traditional to higher-value products. Web inkjet “offers the opportunity to work in a hybrid print operation, provided the right applications and business benefits are addressed”, he argues.
“For example, a commercial printer with a large but ageing fleet of offset presses may not want to continue buying more offset presses but rather migrate suitable volume to a webfed inkjet press and modernise their work processes from the print operation to the bindery. A Canon/Océ inkjet system will enable high quality multiple applications to be produced in developing an investment strategy for high speed inkjet,” he says.
Stake out your inkjet tasks first
On Demand, a 25-year-old digital-only business in Melbourne, currently with some 100 staff, became the first in Australia to adopt the Océ Colorstream two-and-a-half-years ago. The company has been a VDP specialist from its early days (beginning as TDC3 in 1989) and more recently has developed a thriving crossmedia business. It runs a varied range of Xeroxs, HP Indigos and Canon/Océ inkjets – in black-and white and colour — and was a pioneer in tethering its colour PSO to the AS/ISO 12647-2 standard.
Managing director Bruce Peddlesden sees the Océ Colorstream as delivering the hardware clout that brings speed and flexibility in the printroom and enables all these data-handling innovations to realise their full potential.
The Colorstream has a specific cut of turf at On Demand and he has been careful not to migrate existing digital business from the company’s two HP Indigo 7000 sheetfeds and its Indigo 7200 webfed machine, which generate the higher-quality work on a wider variety of substrates, but at costs that do not justify long-haul jobs. “We didn’t want to steal from Peter to pay Paul,” says Peddlesden. Because he sorted out the role he wanted the Colorstream to play before deciding to invest, it is productive.
The aim was to break through the cost-per-page barriers associated with xerographic shell printing. And while the Indigos offer premium colour, the cost-per-page does not lend itself to volume. Web inkjet promised a radically different unit cost.
“A lot of our clients wanted to go colour but it was prohibitive in the costing. With inkjet, you’re bringing the world of colour into a reasonable price range. It’s highly productive in black-and-white and colour. The quality of the finished products really relies on the quality of the stocks — and the mills are now putting a lot more effort into papers suitable for inkjets.”
For example, drying problems have made printing on gloss stock a challenge for web inkjets, says Peddlesden, but that is changing fast with R&D from paper manufacturers.
“We’re doing a lot of VDP transactional work on the Colorstream. And as print runs come down in publishing, we’re in a much better position to fulfil short-run book orders. Originally it was existing customers as well as those who we knew had a requirement but weren’t ordering this kind of work because of the cost. So we knew there was a lot of new work we could get.”
On Demand has taken a series of field upgrades from the original 3500 configuration which printed 70 metres/min — through a 3700 (100 m/min) — and now to a 3900 (128m/m), Peddlesden sees speed and volume as inkjet’s selling points to his customers. “At say 100 metres a minute, printing two double-sided A4s across, you’re talking millions of images a day.”
On Demand has used the Colorstream for complex superannuation reporting, and for short-run training, education and publishing clients. Often book blocks will be printed on the Océ line, with covers printed on one of the HP Indigos.
Peddlesden makes the point that inkjet is a relatively straightforward technology (print heads and an engine to drive the web feed past), so there is less to go wrong than with toner printing, and a downtime less than two percent of operating time.
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