One of the interesting facts about high-speed inkjet printing is that in many cases the print head manufacturers rather than the press manufacturers drive new products.

Inkjet print heads are in a constant state of development, in much the same way as microprocessors, memories and other silicon based products. In this one can see that when an updated print head is announced by a print head manufacturer, we can expect press suppliers that use that manufacturer’s heads will six to eighteen months later announce an enhanced inkjet press. This delay is due to the time from print head announcement, availability of sample heads, and putting the head into production.

In September 2009 Kyocera announced a 40 kHz version of its KJ4 print head with a 33 per cent faster jetting speed than its existing 30 kHz print heads. Last week Océ, the major user of the KJ4 print head announced two new models of its JetStream press range using this new head.

The two new presses are the JetStream 1400 and the JetStream 3000. The JetStream 1000 is based upon the entry-level JetStream 1000, but as it name implies it runs at 1,350 A4 pages per minute (100 metres/min). The JetStream 1000/1400 is a single unit duplex press printing both sides of the web in the same unit. The JetStream 3000 is a development of the JetStream 2200 but running at a speed using two linked print engines of 2,700 A4 pages/minute (200 metres/min). The difference in speed of the two presses is that the JetStream 3000 has twice the number of print heads as the JetStream 1400.

The presses were announced last week at the Océ Production Printing Summit at Poing, Germany. It is understood that availability will be from October this year, but as yet prices have not been set.

The Océ Production Printing Summit is a new event that may well be the event that takes over from the earlier Océ Open House. This is an event where Océ and its partners show their range of products. It is however unlike the earlier Open House in that there are no Océ office systems or Océ wide format systems. There was also little Canon equipment apart from the jointly developed Canon imagePRESS C7010VPS.

The only other new development I saw at the event was a version of the Océ JetStream 1000 aimed at industry-standard book production. This was a press linked with an inline book finishing system, however the key development was this was the first time an Océ JetStream press has been offered with pigment rather than dye based ink. (The Océ ColorStream 3500 works at this time only with pigment inks). Océ is committed to making both pigment and dye based inks for both the JetStream and ColorStream presses, but no schedule has been defined for making pigment inks available on other JetStream presses.

I think the offering of pigment inks is a key announcement as at this time while the book printing industry, particularly in the USA, has started adopting high-speed inkjet printing, Océ has had very limited sales in this area where most sales have been made by HP with its T-Series presses, and with the Kodak Prosper presses starting to also to sell into this market. HP and Kodak both only use pigment inks in this application and I see that they give much more of an offset quality than inkjet presses using dye based inks.

One of the key sessions at the event was the opening keynote session in which one of the speakers was Gerd Finkbeiner, the Chairman of the Executive Board of manroland AG. He spoke of the cooperative partnership between Océ and manroland. manroland is a distribution partner for Océ to sell high-speed inkjet presses into the graphic arts market. Océ refers to this strategic alliance as “digital meets offset power”.

Mr Finkbeiner envisaged that digital printing within five years should be a €100m business for manroland. In discussion with both Océ and manroland executives later it was seen that Océ was learning a lot about the requirement for the commercial print business from manroland and that for the future it was anticipated that manroland would be a major contributor into the overall Océ press design process. manroland however stated it would not be manufacturing any inkjet presses or parts of presses for Océ.

The company would however been developing certain inline finishing systems using experience from its manufacture of inline finishing systems for its web offset presses. The first such product was described and this was an inline plough folding system for linking with Océ JetStream presses to be used for the book printing market.

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