The State of On-demand Printing

At Drupa, Kodak unveiled its first DOD ink-jet high-speed color press, the Kodak Versamark VL2000 with a print width of 20˝ and a speed of 246 fpm. Kodak recently announced a quartet of new DOD ink-jet presses: the VL6000, VL6200, VL4000 and VL42000. Kodak’s single engine VL6000 can print at speeds up 492 fpm at resolutions of 600x600 dpi. The VL6200 model is a dual-engine system that can output at the same speed and resolution, as well as perform two-up duplex operation. The VL4000 and VL4200 machines (410 fpm) can be used for the digital printing of newspapers.

On March 10, 2008, HP announced a move into the continuous feed ink-jet color printing market. The HP Inkjet Web Press is a 30˝ wide web press. This created excitement because the competitive products are 20˝ wide. This twin-engine duplex printing engine press runs at 400 fpm, which equates to 2,600 letter or A4 ppm. It is the fastest and largest format size of all these new presses, and was an impressive site at Drupa. According to HP, the cost per print is the lowest of all these new presses. HP indicates that an A4 color page with 30 percent coverage will cost $0.01 and a basic monochrome page will cost $0.0015.

Electrophotographic Developments

What struck me about that Wall Street Journal article more then anything else was the unbalanced reporting. While the advancements in ink-jet technology are impressive, so are the advancements in offset technology and electrophotographic or toner-based equipment.

At the mid-range in the market, two toner-based products got a lot of attention at Drupa: Xerox 700 and Ricoh Pro C900. The Xerox 700 is a 70-ppm color machine that is positioned between the DocuColor 260 and the Docu-Color 5000. It uses low-melt EA toner and delivers a matte finish to images, rather than the traditional glossy image.