The days of seeing inkjet as just a technology for home printers and plotters is gone. Over recent years, major manufacturers have launched machines designed to take over sectors once owned by conventional offset or digital. In Australia, there has been a spate of inkjet web press installations. This wave look to continue as more print firms find their market space can be adequately accommodated by inkjet’s specific capabilities.

Those already using high-volume inkjet are presently focused in three main print sectors: books, essential mail and transpromo printing, and direct marketing. Each has a different, but
in some ways very similar, story to tell.

Transactions on the fly

It’s no surprise that transactional and transpromo printers quickly moved into inkjet technology. It is an immediate and obvious fit, with its high speed, its ability to personalise each impression and its acceptable, if not eye-catching, print quality. Most were already heavily involved in digital via toner-based equipment to overprint on litho ‘shells’ bearing the customer’s branding and other standard content.

But there’s more to this inkjet shift than straightforward production ability. It’s the business case that really makes sense once print customers understand the calculations. As one printer told ProPrint, individual unit costs may be higher than an equivalent offset unit, but all the fringe benefits of inkjet provide a compelling argument: personalisation, short runs to suit campaigns and the subsequent removal of warehousing, storage, transport and bulk orders from the equation, removal of pre-press processes, and easy inline finishing.

Australia Post showed its faith in inkjet with a multimillion-dollar investment in two Océ ColorStream 3700 twin web presses in July, which the company said were “the first in Australia dedicated to the transactional market”. 

They were installed in Australia Post’s Sydney and Melbourne print facilities, along with a sophisticated new software system for driving its transactional print requirements and a Pitney Bowes Rival inserting system.

According to Australia Post, the Océ presses replaced offset shell processes, and delivered major productivity gains, as well as less wastage and faster turnaround.

Head of Australia Post’s IT e-communications, Chris Miller, told ProPrint in July: “One of the key features for us was that, when the operator needs to stop the presses, they stop immediately and can then be started again at exactly the same place without any quality deterioration and while maintaining full data and print integrity.”

Another major transactional printer, SEMA, underwent a series of disruptions earlier this year after going into administration and then being turned around through a management buyout. In the months before the failure, the company had made a $10 million investment in two Impika iPrint eVolution high-speed inkjet presses to match inkjet investments by competitors Salmat and Computershare, though only one was ever installed.

Brian Smith, chief marketing officer at SEMA, tells ProPrint that inkjet technology is shifting the ballgame in this sector, and offset is the likely victim as variable data capabilities become indispensable.

“Clearly, when inkjet has the ability to either move generic collateral from being an insert to an onsert, or to transform it to highly relevant messaging as part of a document, then the technologies that produced the generic collateral will suffer. Offset printing is one of the casualties of that technology change. 

“Inkjet has had a number of impacts. Obviously, the faster speed of the machine has had productivity benefits over previous cut-sheet technologies. The continuous feed means that productivity losses through machine set-ups have also been reduced. We have certainly found that the quality of the inkjet technology has been well received by our clients.” 

While Smith believes offset has taken a hit, toner-based digital print won’t suffer the same fate.

“While inkjet technology is delivering fantastic results, there will continue to be a place for high-quality, toner-based, full-colour technologies,” he said. “The broader substrate capabilities lend themselves to producing rich, high-value output that inkjet isn’t aimed at. In fact, the interest that has been generated by the value of a personalised colour communication piece on inkjet technology has driven increased demand for the toner-based technologies as well. It’s about relevance.”

SEMA’s decision to invest in Impika was based on its ability to deliver higher-quality product than other inkjet devices. “The Impika was chosen because it offered a quality that we believed was more relevant for our customers, who are predominantly in the marketing space. It also has the capability to be upgraded in speed or resolution when the market demands.”

Read all about it

The book market, and the attendant fortunes of book publishers and producers, has been a sloping graph for some time – sloping in the wrong direction. The business model of book publishing has adjusted quickly to try to compensate, and so are book producers in an effort to maintain a viable industry. But printers say predictions of the death of the book from the rise of digital information formats are somewhat premature.

In September last year, Griffin Press took the plunge into high-speed inkjet printing with the first installation of the HP T350 digital press coupled with the first Muller Martini SigmaLine in Australia. At the time, Ben Jolly, general manager at Griffin Press, said the T350 inkjet press configured with the SigmaLine was an ideal solution for book runs from a few hundred copies onwards.

SOS Print & Media invested even earlier in inkjet, installing a Kodak Prosper 1000 inkjet press to produce black-and-white books for publishing clients. Director Michael Schulz says that print prices in this sector are lower, placing pressure on producers to find new economies of scale to assist book publishers to maintain their market.

He says SOS has been “pushing through up to 40 million impressions on the Kodak Prosper 1000 press each month”.

At its best, inkjet brings an increase in productivity and quality and a decrease in price. The amazing speed and the simplicity of the process mean that the productivity is 20 or more times higher than the fastest toner-based digital printing. Pricing is comparatively lower, as long as the high cost of investment is offset by high volumes.

“Clients always respond well to productivity improvements and reductions in price, and inkjet has brought such a shift to digital that clients are happy to explore new avenues. We find that inkjet does definitely allow us to produce jobs that were formerly done offset, with the added opportunities of digital print, like short runs, segmentation, personalisation, et cetera.”

As in transpromo shell printing, offset printing is losing ground to inkjet, says Schulz. Add personalisation and it becomes a better prospect in numerous ways.

“Definitely the rise of inkjet is coming at the expense of other technologies such as offset. I expect that soon we’ll see a similar development in colour.”

He is also optimistic that inkjet will take more market share as it develops, and shows performance features that clearly outstrip other technologies.

“With equipment prices coming down and the technology maturing, most high-volume digital printers will have an inkjet within three years, and most offset printers will complement their presses with inkjet,” he predicts.

In March, Opus Group, which owns McPherson’s Printing Group, the largest book producer in Australia, installed an HP T400 inkjet web press, an HP Indigo 7500, a Flex Book finishing line from Magnum Digital Solutions and a Muller Martini Acoro binding line in its Maryborough Victoria facility. 

The combination of systems has been branded as ‘Onyx’ by Opus. It is the first in Australia, and indeed, one of the first of its kind in the world. The Onyx system was a true collaboration between McPherson’s, Opus, HP, Canadian developer Magnum and Muller Martini.

Opus chief executive Cliff Brigstocke largely agrees with Michael Schulz about the attractiveness of inkjet as a means of adapting to the new business model of book publishers.

“The big change for us has been the change in dynamics in the publishing industry, particularly in the read-for-pleasure market, and as a result we’ve seen print runs come down,” he says. “We knew that was happening and we tried to be ahead of the curve on that. 

“We’ve also seen more titles at the same time, so while print runs have come down, there have been more titles. There has been a plethora of titles through self-publishing in one channel, and also customisations and content repurposing at the other end of the scale. 

“While the run sizes are coming down, collectively the volumes are similar, or in some cases, such as educational, increasing. So what that means for us is inkjet as a solution is much more adaptable and much more flexible for that change.”

Brigstocke says that publishers have readily accepted the new technology’s ability to provide books as required, in numbers that don’t require as much warehousing, and in more advantageous timeframes.

“The support from the major publishers has been stunning. It’s helped their model. Speed to market is critical, and in many cases we’re getting books to market well before someone like Amazon can ship from overseas, and that’s supporting the local industry.

“We can now offer a much more flexible solution. It’s dramatically faster so we have improved turnaround times. In conjunction with [procurement system] iPath, it allows us to work much more seamlessly with our clients. It takes out a lot of touch points so it does give a dynamic production advantage. We really see the jobs flying through the business,” says Brigstocke.

“We have noticed a change in reprints. In the new world, clients might order 1,000, digitally produced, and then in another three weeks they might order another 1,000, so it does provide a lot more flexibility around ordering and those associated costs.”

Speak to me

The direct mail sector has a success story to tell about redefining the ability of print to speak engagingly with target markets. Personalisation has helped swing the marketing dollar back into print’s corner because of its ability to use personal data to connect individually with recipients.

The honours go to toner-based digital production, but inkjet has taken a hold in this market too, by bringing a new set of specifications that offer the personalised digital advantage along with the production numbers that used to belong to offset.

Bruce Peddlesden, managing director of On Demand in Melbourne, was a pioneer in the digital sphere, but also stepped early into the inkjet arena in November last year, with a web-fed Océ ColorStream 3500, to handle books and direct marketing work.

“Our industry is changing, and continues to change,” Peddlesden tells ProPrint. “The Océ is a variable data engine that can do lots of prints; we’ve got it doing about 100 metres a minute double-sided. 

“We were very good in the high-quality colour market with the HP Indigo 7200, but customers were looking for an alternative that was more cost effective and lower quality. The inkjet side covers that beautifully. It’s cost effective, and is very productive, and it’s good for our business graphics side, whereas the Indigo is much better quality.”

The Océ enables On Demand to reach into new sectors, says Peddlesden, because it fits neatly between digital and offset in its ability, but brings greater cost efficiencies at the same time.

“It hasn’t changed the way we sell print but it’s given us a broader market,” he says. “We can compete in a much bigger area now. Even the run lengths in digital are coming down now. In this online age you see something online, you press go and you want it in three days. The offset model doesn’t suit that. Customers don’t want to hold stock and warehouse it.”

It also offers present customers other options, and new ways to add value to projects, he said.

“We were limited with the click model with digital, which is quite expensive per impression, whereas inkjet is a lot cheaper and more productive, so we are going into a new and bigger area, and are able to be more competitive in the longer run work. With the Indigo, we were competitive up to the 1,000 mark; now we’re competitive up to the 3,000 to 4,000 area. 

“It’s also helping people buy shorter run lengths that weren’t really viable on offset. We are aiming to take a black-and-white customer and turn them into a colour customer. To take them from black-and-white to colour on an Indigo is very expensive. To take them from black-and-white to colour on inkjet is not as big a step.”

Marc Selby is operations director of Alphabet Publishing, which produces direct mail, books and other specialised products. The company invested in a pair of Screen TruePress Jet 520 presses at the beginning of the year to take advantage of the company’s extensive data mining expertise.

“Our parent company is basically a marketing company. We could see the writing on the wall; our business model over the next 10 years would change. So we looked at how we could impact on our cost structure. We do a lot of printing and we were doing it in an old-fashioned way, by printing shells and personalising them with one colour on our toner-based machines. That was a bit constrictive, and very expensive with click charges.”

With a marketing company as a parent and deep data mining as a skill, Alphabet Publishing has every intention of driving its direct marketing and mail opportunities hard.

“Our long-term goal is product we own ourselves, but in years one and two we’ll take on other work. We hope over the next three years or so we’ll build on our concepts and ideas.

“Anybody who’s serious about print knows inkjet has a long way to go in quality before it compares with offset, but some of the stuff we’re seeing is getting better and better. The fact is, if you take an offset order for a million, you can say to the customer, ‘I can put someone’s name on every single one of them’, for example, and you can still offer it to them at an acceptable price.”

One challenge pointed out by both Marc Selby and Michael Schulz is the relative lack of suitable paper stocks.

“Stock is a big challenge, but we’re seeing different stocks all the time now, and it will keep improving,” said Selby.

“Printing has a decreasing volume base, but personalised print is in a steep growth curve,” he adds. “Not everything can be personalised, but a lot can be. And even though the total print count of, say, about eight trillion sheets globally drops to, say, six trillion sheets, that’s still a lot of printing that can be done.” 

Kit list: high-volume inkjet presses

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