While all the interest in this area is on the suppliers and where the presses are being sold, there is one printer that could be said to be years ahead of its competitors in this area of the market. This printer is RR Donnelley, the world’s largest commercial printer.
RR Donnelley has been both an innovator and market leader and in the area of digital printing it has been ahead of the curve in all aspects of digital printing. In fact around the world, where it has operations in North and South America, Europe, China and India, it has more than 1,000 digital imaging devices in operation. It saw the potential of inkjet printing technology in changing the dynamics of the market at an early stage and at that time did not see any supplier producing the kind of presses it was looking for.
RR Donnelley was seeing the market dynamics changing in many areas. In the book publishing area it was finding that 25 per cent of printed books never get to consumers and need to be pulped. It was seeing both the rise of e-books and increasing demand for very short-run book printing. In the transactional printing area it was seeing more demand for colour with up to 40 per cent of pages having a colour component. It was also seeing changes in the direct marketing area with increases in variable data moving from just changes in text to graphical changes on pages.
At Ipex recently I was asked to help organise and to moderate an invitation only event for Cabot Corporation, one of the leading suppliers of colorants for the inkjet printing industry. At this event we had Dr Ronnie Sarker, senior vice president of the Digital Solutions Group of RR Donnelley presenting the company’s inkjet printing strategy to a large number of leading printers from around the world.
The RR Donnelley strategy was to develop its own inkjet printing press as it did not at the time find a suitable press being offered by the industry’s suppliers. The company had a suitable development facility it acquired in 2004 as a part of Moore Wallace operations. In 2008 the company announced its ProteusJet press. This was the first 30-inch wide inkjet press in the market (HP announced it would bring its T300 press to the market in 2009 and Océ announced the JetStream 2800 30-inch press in April 2009, but to my understanding this has yet to ship to a customer). ProteusJet is a 400 feet per minute four-colour press with an operational resolution of 1,200 x 600 dpi. It can also run as a two-colour press at a speed of 800 feet per minute. The press has inline finishing and this part of has been developed in an alliance with Muller Martini. RR Donnelley also has an alliance with HP, and it is understood that this is to assist HP to add MICR toner to HP’s T-Series presses. RR Donnelley don’t indicate which print heads are used in the press, but do indicate that they use drop-on-demand inkjet technology.
In addition to the ProteusJet press, RR Donnelley has also developed the ProteusJet Modular configuration. This is where inkjet imaging units are placed inline on web offset and flexo presses. The speed of these inline units ranges from 400 feet per min in four-colour up to 1,200 feet per min in monochrome at 1,200 x 400 dpi resolution. ProteusJet Modular units range from 2-inches to 30-inches in width.
Currently RR Donnelley has eight ProteusJet presses installed working in the transactional and direct mail markets. Book printing is now being started and RR Donnelley expects to double the number of ProteusJet installations by the end of this year.
Among the key points made by Dr Sarker in this presentation and the subsequent Q&A session were the following. Firstly the digital front end is very important and it should be specific to the required market. For example RR Donnelley makes use of GMC software for many applications. Links to customers are very important with portals for online approvals. In this RR Donnelley has developed its own CustomPoint portal for print ordering and file submissions. This includes a composition engine and works on accepting PDF files as standard. Dr Sarker indicated that web-based inkjet differs from sheetfed toner digital presses in that makereadies have to be allowed for, as well as time for making print head and web changes.
One of the key issues mentioned concerned inks and substrates. Initially ProteusJet installations used dye based inks, but with the move to book printing it was found that the dye based inks did not produce good enough quality, and there was a switch to pigment based ink. There is also the issue with the desire wherever possible to use the same substrates as used for offset printing. In this the new inks use pigments from Cabot Corporation that do not require any paper pre or post treatment to provide the best quality. Dr Sarker indicated that buying ink directly from the ink suppliers rather than through the press supplier was a benefit in their business model, as was using standard substrates. He indicated that RR Donnelley wanted to have a similar environment to offset printing where they could buy consumables from multiple suppliers. For the future however he indicated that there was a need for specific coated and uncoated inkjet papers at comparable prices to offset papers.
With ProteusJet RR Donnelley has developed a powerful production system that is at least comparable to the inkjet presses available for the industry’s suppliers. The fact that it can run in two-colour mode at double the four-colour speed is something not available on other inkjet presses. The ProteusJet Modular configurations more than match the configurations in the hybrid area from other suppliers. The number of installations that the company has made, and its plans this year shows the huge level of technical excellence available within RR Donnelley. What will be interesting to see is what the future of ProteusJet will be as suppliers bring out the next generation of inkjet presses. Will RR Donnelley bring out ProteusJet II or will it buy future presses from the industry suppliers? Also what will be the future process in the industry for inks and substrates? Will RR Donnelley’s preferred business model become available for all printers or is this just something for organisations with their high level of technical expertise?
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