When is a diversification not a diversification? An investment in large format inkjet for a commercial printer might look like a shift sideways, but for most it is a logical step. The same people that are buying commercial print are frequently specifying large format inkjet. Increasingly this means printers will handle that print, though often it means placing the work with a trade printer.
“Printers are still slow to take up the opportunity by investing in the technology because they are unsure if it’s the right thing to do,” says Agfa’s Paul Fitch. “The problem for them is understanding their ‘go to market’, the applications that are possible, the pricing levels and so on.”
This is not the case for all: some commercial printers have been involved with flatbed printing for many years, a category that includes Pureprint with its acquisition of Imprint, Image Data Group and Fineprint. More recently Hampton Print, Acorn Press and Banbury Print have installed flatbed inkjet presses. The investment needed is somewhat less than that required for a B1 sheetfed litho machine and the margins that can be anticipated from inkjet continue to overshadow those from commoditised litho printing.
“We are now talking seriously to a very large commercial printer that has been outsourcing this work until now,” Fitch continues. “There is work to be had at the investment level needed for a flatbed or hybrid flatbed.” He argues that the barrier is understanding the applications that are possible, and that of finding space. Large format inkjet demands a lot of space, not only for the printer itself, but also for the cutting table, the work in progress and the materials waiting to be printed. “There’s lots of different aspects that printers need to understand before making the commitment,” he adds.
A smaller investment in a rollfed inkjet press in order to gain an understanding of the technology and product requirements might seem appealing. However, the market for pop ups and banners, which these low cost machines suit, has changed. These are commoditised products that are easy to order online and where it is difficult to achieve a margin against aggressive price led hungry competition. Add in the relatively slow production speeds and the need to laminate the substrate to a solid board and any business gain can rapidly evaporate.
The investment in a flatbed inkjet machine is multiple times more, even an entry level machine can run into six figures with something like a SwissQPrint considerably more than that. It means that there will be fewer companies to fight with as this investment is simply too rich for many roll fed based print companies and those at the top end of the market soak up the large volumes to justify the spend on the highest speed Agfa, EFI, Durst or Inca presses. There is room in the middle ground which commercial printers can occupy.
It is also ground for display graphics companies hoping to expand their operations from production of roll fed media. And these are the primary targets for manufacturers that themselves have added flatbed printers to their more established ranges. This has been a development path for Mimaki, Roland DG and most recently for Epson. HP has also moved in this direction bringing its Latex technology to the flatbed sector where UV has been dominant.
Fujifilm and Canon have a large slice of the market, sharing the same core machine until last year, with different models to sub segment the sector further. Then there are the Jetrix machines from Inktec, Liyu presses as the latest to enter the market, Ricoh and SignRacer, and SwissQPrinters at the apex in terms of cost and elegant design and, arguably, quality. These are certainly the only presses currently capable of printing neon colours. Further up the high performance ladder come Agfa, Durst, Inca and EFI Vutek. And there are a sprinkle of other UV flatbed machines from China and elsewhere in Asia that are available in the UK.
As a result there has also been something of a land grab to get machines to market with established dealers serving the display graphics sector who have been courted for their route to market. Consolidation in the sector last year led Ultraflex to buy Mayday Graphics, combining a substrates dealer with an equipment vendor. This year the same has happened with Soyang buying Agfa dealer Josero.
In short there are machines to suit every pocket and every application from any number of specialist dealers.
Graeme Richardson-Locke, technical lead at Fespa, points to the success that Pureprint, L&S and Image Data have had with large format investments. It is possible for commercial printers to have successful diversification in this direction. He explains: “Commercial printers have a relationship with brands and their print buyers who are also buying large format printing. For printers used to buying B1 litho presses, flatbed is a very affordable investment and with an existing relationship to build on, it makes the risk aspect considerably lower.”
When doing an audit of machines available on the European market, he found there were 50 flatbeds.
Commercial printers are also likely to have an IT infrastructure that includes a prepress workflow which can accommodate large format output. Agfa is ahead in this sense. Its Apogee workflow for commercial print has spawned Avanti, its dedicated workflow for large format graphics. It is essentially the same workflow as Apogee but tailored to the needs of the different sector.
The commercial printer is also more likely than the display printer to have a full MIS which can accommodate the new service while display graphics businesses are more likely to be working from a spreadsheet for estimating and job control.
There are further considerations to bear in mind before making the investment. Would a hybrid machine which combines flatbed and roll fed capabilities prove a better choice than a flatbed only printer? There is the latex or UV question to consider. This is again a choice dictated by applications, and how flexible the ink needs to be.
Richardson-Locke warns against making what he calls the Mistake of the Optimistic, where people can get carried away by the rosy predictions of healthy margins before engaging the brain and researching the customer base.
Suppliers may talk about the output speeds that are possible without acknowledging that print produced on a two-pass setting may not be commercially acceptable. It is another thing that printers planning to invest need to look out for. What seems fast on the spec sheet may be infuriatingly slow when printing a sellable job.
“Prospective buyers should always check the speeds that they are being quoted,” he says. “The speed needs to be assessed at the quality level that the application requires and then with regard to what the machine can be expected to produce over the course of a week in operation.
“People can make assumptions about margins and the opportunities that exist. It is easy to be seduced into thinking that a higher margin is possible than is in reality the case. Some product areas are already commoditised, like pop ups, posters and banners. Success is about finding the niches that enable the printer to deliver service and value, which may be about becoming the single source supplier to your customers and that can make a lot of sense.”
To some extent that is also about understanding which products are going to be sold through web to print channels and thus become subject to price led business. Ideally printers should steer away from the sorts of battles they cannot win. He advises companies instead to focus on bespoke projects where there is opportunity to add value. There are a number of reasons why a commercial printer is well placed to do this.
The commercial printer will be better positioned to colour match from four-colour litho to inkjet. This though is perhaps failing to take advantage of the opportunities from the extended gamut that many flatbed printers offer. Large format is not constrained to four-colour process printing. Richardson-Locke says: “This allows a printer to create displays that really pop, or to cover the subtleties of fine art reproduction using orange green and violet to come closer to the original. The light magenta and light cyan channels are to help with gradations between colours.
“There is a marketing value to the extended gamut and the print that results can be really powerful.”
Other considerations must include energy consumption and sustainability. Printing with latex inks may result in output that is more easily recycled than UV inks, but the energy needed to dry latex is exponentially greater, which as energy bills shoot up, can incur a financial as well as a carbon penalty.
Then there is the supplier itself. A machine built by an Asian supplier may be a lower cost investment, and suppliers will point out that many machines are built in China on behalf of the major companies in the industry, but the cost for that lower price may be in a lack of expected service.
He says: “Buyers need to ask whether the machine they were looking at was originally intended for the European market and look at the difference in support that is available. I once bought a machine from Canon and needed to replace the imaging head. A replacement was delivered inside 24 hours. I then bought a machine from China and when it broke down it was out of action for a week and there was difficulty getting an engineer on site.
“Deciding between one machine and another is not always a question about quality or output speed, it is about service and support.”
A flatbed machine will, by its nature, encourage creativity, sometimes literally so. A frequent application is production of samples and prototype carton designs. The press, combined with digital cutting table, can generate different iterations of a design and different styles of carton without the cost and time needed to produce a die.
“White and clear ink (varnish) will also add value and open up product opportunities,” he continues. “An opaque white enables four-colour printing on coloured paper because the white will act as a mask between the colour of the paper and what is being printed,” says Richardson-Locke. While the results can be spectacular, printing a white like this can be slow.
Printing a clear ink opens up even more effects, contrasting the flat surface of the paper with a high gloss while also building the clear varnish to create tactile effects.
This is a key feature of the SwissQPrint range of flatbeds. These are the epitome of Swiss precision, with the accuracy of drop placement to raise the surface of a sheet. While at the top of the pile in terms of cost, the manufacturer justifies this with ease of operation and well thought out features for users. Choosing which of the 256 vacuum segments should be switched on is literally a flip of a tab without the need for further masking.
UK managing director Erskine Stewart says: “Every SwissQPrint wide format printer is manufactured to ensure it delivers the quality and total cost of ownership output our customers’ demand.
“Flexibility, ease of operation, productivity, print quality, affordable cost of ownership and reliability all play their part in customers’ decision making processes when considering new equipment.
“The products have a service life of at least 12 years and our low maintenance approach with unlimited phone and remote support and rapid onsite engineer visits ensure uptime and output are maximised.”
There is a future proof element to the products. The modularity of design enables installation of extra printheads, adding to roll handling capacity. “This also means that retrospective enhancements to existing equipment can remove the need for the acquisition of new printers, by upgrading capabilities and functionality of the machine the customer already has,” says Stewart.
Admiration for these machines makes them a reference point for others. While Fujifilm will not say as much, some of the features on the Acuity range introduced last year draw inspiration from the Swiss company, the tray that keeps tools to hand and prevents them dropping to the floor, ease of access to inks, pumps and more, all recall the Swiss approach.
It was a ‘back to the drawing board’ approach says Ollie Mills, following 20 years of acting as a reseller for Canon’s flatbed Arizona products. The result is the Acuity Prime 20, Prime 30 and Prime L, this with a double sized bed to enable one side to be printed while the other is being prepared with the next sheet. It can also cope with a much larger sheet when required. The range was announced in June and began shipping in Europe in September. To date 40 have been installed.
The printers are made to specification in China, but the design is the result of an industrial design agency watching and recording the actions of operators and where daily frustrations can occur – and using design to mitigate these.
The ink for the machine, including white and clear, is developed and made in Broadstairs and calls on decades of experience in display inks. It is, says Mills, “a multi-purpose ink, with a primer for some difficult media, that gives the printer the ability to say yes to jobs”.
The Prime 20 has two rows of printheads, the Prime 30 has three and it is possible to upgrade to the faster machine. They operate with Ricoh Gen 5 heads after Fujifilm weighed considerations of cost and performance. “We have a machine that distributors want to sell,” he adds. It will be aimed at a replacement machine for existing Acuity installations and to break into new markets. The first UK dealer to be announced was RA Smart, best known for textile printing. Both companies can expand the range of their products like this.
Liyu is a new name to the UK, being sold through the Ultimatum Group. The machines are from Turkey, built in China and based on Swiss designs. Ultimatum was casting around for a revenue stream after Fujifilm’s decision to sever ties with Inca leading to the sale of the UK business to Agfa.
Ultimatum’s engineers had been a first line support for a number of flatbed presses at the end of a warranty period. And while this can continue, it is not a growth business. It cast around for a machine that it might use its engineers to support and found what sales manager Dawn Kelley calls “the best kept secret” in the industry.
She has front line sales experience of capital equipment across the commercial print sector so is perhaps well placed to introduce a competitively priced flatbed machine to commercial printers. There is a showroom in Burscough with machines that seem to disappear, selling as fast as they arrive, whether flatbed, hybrid, roll to roll or for textile printing.
All come with a two-year warranty and Liyu’s own inks and consumables, a Print Factory front end with Ricoh Gen6 heads for quality. Because the manufacturer was chosen by engineers, there is a focus on ease of access and equally ease of implementing an onsite field upgrade, to add additional printheads, say.
There are others entering this part of the market. Ricoh is perhaps the best know from cut sheet, continuous feed and for its roll fed machines as well as supply of what is a leading printhead in the sector.
At the lower end, and lower end is probably defined by speed of output at required quality points rather than quality of output, come machines from Roland DG and Mimaki. Banbury Litho is a user of the Mimaki JFX200 flatbed, for example.
There is a lengthy line up of machines from China, some better known than others, as well as machines from other parts of Europe. SignRacer falls into this category, being designed, if not produced, in Switzerland.
Sold by Nth Degree Imaging, it has been chosen by Hampton Printing for its first step into flatbed inkjet printing. Given Hampton’s reputation for quality of print, this was to the fore in the decision.
Ricoh does not lack for brand awareness, but that is tied to cut sheet digital presses, or perhaps continuous feed inkjet. It has an established presence with roll fed latex ink machines, but is without a reputation in large format flatbeds.
“It’s always about understanding the application,” says Fitch at Agfa. “There are so many opportunities from the existing customer base. Taking these is about the knowledge and the know how. We have seen customers like Platinum HPL and Fisherprint make the jump through an acquisition followed by investment to replace machines that were relatively slow.
“And printers deciding on the next investment: is it another press to compete in a market where margins are 3-4% or one where they can be 20-25%?”
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