The Hunkeler Innovation Days pulled the most international audience of any industry gathering to a lakeside town in Switzerland over four days last week, cementing its position as the key event for long run digital printing.
It has developed as continuous feed digital printing has expanded from mono laser printing, often but not always electrophotographic to colour, to mono and limited quality inkjet colour and now to high volume commercial quality colour. Along the way, a technology confined to the basements of town halls and specialist service providers printing bills and statements has absorbed book printing, litho preparing and is now knocking on the door of catalogue and magazine production.
The event has expanded beyond one production hall to a second hall where companies took smaller information booths to talk technology, paper, and software. Size was no indication of the importance attached to this presence. KBA did not show a press as it had last time, but booked one of these stands and company CEO Claus Bolza Schuenemann was on hand.
The main action was in the production hall where more than 40 different set ups and applications were on show, some for the very first time. Kodak ran the new version of its Kodak Prosper 1000 at 300m/min; Muller Martini launched the Verseo perfect binder; Xerox revealed its reel to cut sheet inkjet press, the Rialto 900; Xeikon launched the 9800, setting a new speed point for dry toner printing; and Canon showed the Colorstream 3000Z for the first time.
Others were content with announcements: Canon announced the launch of its cut sheet inkjet press, previously known as Niagara, as the Varyprint 300i; it also announced a narrower version of its flagship ImageStream 3000 as the ImageStream 2400; Xeikon provided further details of its Trillium product.
The event had attracted more than 5,000 pre booked visitors, many invited by distributors like Friedheim International which hosted more than 100 from the UK. More than 200 flew in from the US. The overriding impression was that continuous feed inkjet, given the right application and the right substrate, will compete with both sheetfed and webfed offset litho. The unknown issue is how many suitable applications there are today and how quickly these will grow. In the mono sector, continuous feed inkjet has proved its value, taking on a growing share of the book market and forcing Timsons, a specialist book press supplier from the market.
Hunkeler showed its own Bookline finishing system in this space, with the addition of a glue nozzle to apply a fine line of glue inside the four-, six- and eight-page signatures produced. These result in a book block which is already stuck together and which therefore does not need to be milled before binding, which can exist as a low cost, short life bound product in its own right, or can be a block for cased binding. A DynaCut system will also switch automatically between books of a different length to increase versatility.
DynaCut featured on the dynamic perforating and punching line for direct mail applications and in the new newspaper line which switches dynamically from broadsheet to tabloid and using twin collating drums can deliver a 140pp product.
Newspapers have been conservative in their approach to inkjet printing, despite the efforts of print engine suppliers to promote the benefits of on demand, low waste printing. It is taking hold in remote locations where delivery of conventional papers is slow, difficult and expensive. Those suppliers now hoping to entice commercial printers and their customers must hope that history is not going to repeat itself.
A full report of the Hunkeler Innovation Days 2015 will appear in the March/April issue of Print Business, out on 30 March.
Ricoh brought the full VC60000 inkjet press to Hunkeler Innovation Days. It could not fail to impress. Alongside was the new Pro C9100 which drew a stream of admirers.
