CPI is the largest monochrome book printing organization in Europe with sixteen plants. I was privileged to meet with CPI in early 2008 before HP has announced its high-speed inkjet web press operation, and at that time they outlined their plans to me for changing their methods of operation for book printing. At that time CPI had emerged from financial difficulties and had just been restructured.
CPI’s operations in its plants in France, the UK, Netherlands, Germany and the Czech Republic used a mix of offset, letterpress and digital technology to produce books. They had identified that there was a major production gap in the market where digital monochrome printing was suited for work in the short run segment of less than 1,000 copies, whereas its litho and letterpress operations were suited for run lengths beyond 3,000 copies.
They were also seeing the highest area of growth in the book printing market was for run lengths between 3,000 and 5,000 copies, and the second largest growth was from 1,500 copies to 3,000 copies. They also were seeing overall run lengths dropping and the average run lengths on their high-capacity Cameron Book Presses had come down from 13,000 copies in 2005 to 10,700 copies in 2009. They were also seeing the turnaround times for book production were down to as little as two days.
The problem CPI, and other book printers were facing was that while offset and letterpress printing had low variable print costs they had very high fixed costs in terms of set up and manning. This also meant that publishers would tend to utilize the low variable costs to print more books that they needed because of the high costs of reprinting books later.
In fact it was found in France that 35% of all books printed were later pulped when unsold largely brought about by over purchasing in the first place in order to get a low unit price. The CPI vision was to want to develop what they termed “the Digital Cameron Press.” The Cameron press is a specialist fully automated letterpress book press that takes a wide paper web in at one end and delivered totally automatically a fully finished and bound book at the output end.
The problem with the Cameron press, of which CPI has many units around Europe, is plate making takes many hours and set up of the press can take in excess of one hour before printing starts. The CPI vision for the future was a totally automated digital press taking digital data in and delivering fully finished books at a suitable costs to make it feasible for printing books in run lengths from 500 to well beyond 3,000 copies.
To implement this vision they decided to work with HP’s new IHPS operation and build this concept around HP’s High-Speed inkjet Web Press, now referred to as the HP T300 press. The order for this press was announced at drupa in 2008.
The press was installed in October 2009 at the CPI Firmin-Didot plant and started test production in November. HP however is only one of CPI’s partners in bringing this vision to reality. HP has sold a number of T300 presses to book printers, but CPI is the only one to go for a total inline solution and they refer to the total solution as the Quantum system.
All the other presses sold by HP are running the press reel to reel and are using offline book finishing technologies. CPI’s inline book production system uses technologies from Canadian supplier Magnum and from Muller Martini. The Magnum system is the key item in that it first splits the printed web into page width ribbons, and then converts these ribbons in to collated and bound book blocks that can be up to 900 pages in size.
The book blocks are then taken into a Muller Martini Accoro binder that fits the HP Indigo printed covers and trims the books to finished size. This is all done totally automatically without any manual intervention. This includes setting up the Magnum and Muller Martini systems through JDF commands.
So how well does all this work and has the CPI vision become reality. The answer is a definite yes. Publishers who initially doubted whether CPI’s concept would work have found the print quality is better than the analog processes, the cost model is working and delivery times are better, and the Quantum system is producing around 2,000 finished books/hour.
To show how successful it has been for CPI, is that they are starting an implementation plan to switch production to digital throughout the group and they have plans to install up to ten Quantum system over the next five years and switch 20% of their book production to digital printing.
CPI announced that they have ordered two further Quantum systems that will be installed at another CPI plant in the near future. CPI believes that for the future they need to differentiate themselves from their competition with customized printing solutions, and they are putting their future into a partnership with HP.
HP took the opportunity at this event to update us on the current installation status of the T300 presses. O’Neill Data Systems in Los Angeles installed the first system in early 2009 and has been running in full production since October 2009. They are producing in excess of 50 million impressions a month and have achieved an uptime of 80% over that time.
Frederic Printing, a member of Consolidated Graphics installed its T300 press in June 2009 and printed up to 20 million pages in its three-week peak season for education books. The third largest US book printer Courier installed its press in February 2010.
In Italy book printer Rotolitho Lombarda installed its press in January 2010 and produced its first job in February. It specializes in mid run length colour children’s books, atlases and educational and scientific publications. In the UK Communisis, a leading transactional and direct mail printer, installed its press in February and within two weeks started printing its largest job that meant printing two million pages daily with a very high-level of variable content.
The latest order announced by HP has been for leading US digital printing organization Strategic Content Imaging. In addition to the above organizations HP’s partner Pitney Bowes recently announced an order for three Intellijet systems each of which uses the T300 press. HP announced also that it expected to be installing inkjet web presses at a rate of at least one pres a month for the remainder of 2010.
HP told us that they have found the T300 has been very reliable and they have found the Scalable Printing Technology print heads have been three times more reliable that predicted. Their initial belief was that they would get an average of one print head failure every shift.
They have found that they are getting an average of one failure every third shift. To put this into context a T300 press has 140 print heads and that the print redundancy built into the press means that a print head failure is detected automatically and can be replaced without impacted on either print quality or production.
One of the key messages we heard from HP concerned the substrates that are being used for the T300 press. For uncoated standard substrates HP has its bonding agent that is printed wherever an ink spot is to be printed. HP is now also offering its ColorPro range of uncoated papers and with these one does not need to use the bonding agent. Recently HP has announced an agreement with Georgia Pacific to supply ColorPro media.
One of the most significant announcements however concerned the availability of coated substrates. The demand for this came from Frederic Printing, and Appleton Coating working with HP are now supplying its new range of Utopia coated substrates in a range of paper weights for use on the T300 press.
Again one does not need to use bonding agent when using these substrates. To my understanding this is the first continuous feed colour press in the market that is printing on coated substrates, and this will open up new areas of the market. HP is also discussing the use of its technologies for coated and uncoated substrates with a range of paper suppliers.
As far as Ipex HP and HP Indigo at this stage are keeping their powder dry and to my understanding are not disclosing any new announcements until the opening of the show.
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