Fujifilm is bringing the curtain down on the Acuity large format printers that were launched as its “new blueprint” for large format inkjet just five years ago.
The range was designed and developed at Broadstairs, Fujifilm’s centre for large format printing. It was positioned as a ground up design intended to establish clear blue water between Fujifilm and the competition.
The water has proved neither blue enough nor deep enough to establish Fujifilm in a profitable niche. In a statement, the company says: “Within the wide format inkjet segment, where the market has matured and pricing pressures have increased, we have decided to discontinue sales of the Acuity Prime and Acuity Ultra systems.”
In other words the competition from low cost locations in Asia has become too intense for Fujifilm to stand out and this has reduced the demand for the Acuity as printers choose lower cost alternatives. The Acuity uses Ricoh’s Gen5 inkjet heads as do many almost generic printers. Likewise Rips are standardised, making it challenging to distinguish its products from rivals.
Fujifilm continues: “The graphics printing market has been facing increasing profitability pressures in various segments and geographical regions. This situation has been driven by several factors, including rising material and operating costs, declining demand due to the shift towards digital communications, and continued economic slowdown particularly in Europe and North America.”
This sparked a review of activities which also led to discontinuing the Jetpress 750S B2 sheetfed press and the continuous feed JetPress 1160 in European and North American markets, for the same core reasons. The competition in this market segments is intense and Fujifilm was unable at this point to deliver anything significantly different.
This has spared the JetPress FP790, its inkjet press for printing flexible packaging and it will spare the Acuity Titon which uses the waterbased, UV cured Aquafuze ink and aims at the same segment of the market as energy hungry latex ink printers or less than environmentally friendly solvent inks.
Fujifilm’s Print on Demand division, built around the Revoria toner presses, is unaffected. The Revoria range retains USPs including six-colour printing, soon to be extended with green toner and with a new version of the flagship PC1200 already available in Asian markets.
The Broadstairs factory, once one of the only Fujifilm R&D operations outside Japan, will now revert to being an inkjet inks factory alone.
