Regardless of whether as a commercial printer you are in the market for an inkjet press today, perhaps next year, or as far as you are concerned, never, it makes sense to understand what you might be dealing with. That way your decisions can be based on sound judgement rather than emotion, or worse, the sales pitches of people who stand to pick a tidy bonus if you sign up. The right decision for any business requires knowledge and understanding.
That was the premise of the Inkjet Roadshow, a three-stop seminar that began with a coffee and bacon bap and ended with lots of questions. Lots.
The proposals came from four suppliers with a vested interest in the success of inkjet, namely Kyocera, Fujifilm, Screen and Tecnau, but they were not selling their specific solution, but rather acknowledging that other suppliers exist and speaking generically wherever possible. Print Business was on hand to see that each stayed closely to a remit to be educational and did not stray into making those sales pitches, or not too many. That filled the first half of each session. After a shot of caffeine, questions were invited and in-depth discussions followed. It was enlightening for the audience. Enlightening too for the sponsors, showing that inkjet printing is a vast topic that is imperfectly understood by printers and also by those committed by dint of their technology to it.
There was effectively no overlap between the participants. Kyocera produces the Taskalfa C15000, an SRA3 sheetfed press that is at the starting point of its inkjet journey in commercial print and fills a similar role for a commercial printer, particularly one with a mailing side to its business. Fujifilm has been developing and selling the Jetpress 750 for 15 years and has a machine whose quality cannot be faulted but whose commercial adoption perhaps can. Screen is behind the continuous feed TruepressJet 520, also much tweaked since its initial launch and adopted by transactional and book printers in this country and beyond. Finally Tecnau is the Italian company that works with the print engine providers to answer questions about paper handling and what happens after the ink has hit the paper, turning what is a printed roll into a mailing piece, magazine or book. And again there were many questions.
The short tour took in locations in Leeds, Leicester and Swindon to address printers from the north, the Midlands and east of the country, and finally the west and the south. There were some similar questions from each location and some that varied. What was constant were the introductions and the ground these covered. Some of the audience had no experience of inkjet whatsoever, some had looked a few years ago and at least one bemoaned the cancellation of Heidelberg’s Primefire B1 inkjet press.
Apparently it is the perfect machine for printing hair dye cartons. It can print them in any sequence and it does not matter how many Ash Blondes and Chestnut Browns there are to a sheet, each is printed without fear of colour accuracy being affected by any other cartons on the sheet.
Screen kicked off proceedings with Screen Europe managing director Bui Burke explaining that ongoing technology development is making inkjet more appealing to more markets all the time. Screen has 200 engines from the continuous feed range across Europe and 200 inkjet label presses across the same territory.
The take over of label printing has happened because the technology has reached the point where it can do what label printers have needed. “The first inkjet label presses could not do 2pt reversed out text,” Burke says. “So they did not do what people wanted and there were huge running costs. Now they can. The technology has reached the tipping point.”
This has been necessary to spur the transition to inkjet printing.
His argument is that the same is now happening for commercial printers. But as with labels it cannot be an overnight switch. The business profile of some label printers in terms of customers and run lengths means that flexo may still be preferred. It is not a simple cut off according to the numbers that the financial people might like it to be.
The financial argument will say that up to a certain point, measured in metres, the digital technology is more cost effective. Beyond that the traditional methods deliver better margins. It is, says Burke, not as simple as that. If a printer has a mix of jobs that need to be delivered at the same time, say 2 o’clock on Friday afternoon, the printer may prefer to keep even the jobs that go well beyond the point that flexo printing is viable, for consistency and control.
The equivalent in commercial print will be where there are frequent plate changes. The hassle of stopping the press, removing completed sheets from the delivery, perhaps changing paper in the feed and changing plates four or six times an hour can be a burden which is removed with inkjet printing. “If you are changing plates six times an hour, you need inkjet,” he says.
The advances that have made this possible include better inks and vastly improved drying systems, both of which contribute to being able to print on a wider range of substrates, including coated papers that commercial printers and their customers are familiar with. The Screen technology does not need to run a priming coat on coated papers to ensure it dries, but can do so where the highest gloss levels are required.
Screen’s preferred option for drying is an NIR system where the dosage of energy delivered to the paper can be adjusted as required according to ink coverage and paper type used. To do so on a litho press with hot air/IR drying is possible, but few will take advantage.
Maintenance issues have also improved as inkjet has become better understood. There is now a six to eight week gap between engineer visits which means more press availability for the printer. This is comfortably longer than can be expected from a toner press. The piezo printheads that many use are less of a consumable element to be discarded, after handling a certain volume of ink, than a component which performs for years without problem. Screen reckons to change two or three heads per year per press. And the heads themselves are frequently recoverable in a deep clean device which reduces the total cost of ownership when the recalcitrant printhead is reclaimed.
Ink, however, remains a financial bug bear. “Ink needs to be cheaper,” says Burke with the air of a man who has been asked the question many, many times. Unfortunately until volumes build it will remain costly and volumes will not build until machines are in the field and there is a limit to the number of presses that Screen, or any other supplier, can make each year. The situation is not helped by a tendency to try to recover development costs early in a product’s life. However, as the overall population of inkjet presses increases, so too will ink volumes and economies of scale will kick in.
In any case, the issue is something of a chimera. It is not a like for like comparison. Inkjet will lay down less ink than litho. The nature of the beast is that none is wasted or left on rollers, optimised software helps to minimise ink demand and by the time plates, washes and blankets are priced in, the differential falls.
“There are factors at play,” Burke explains. “Energy and drying costs will be higher compared to conventional presses using water based ink, especially with a high TAC. On the other hand there are no plates and associated costs, paper on the reel is cheaper, the amount of energy is controlled digitally and there is almost no waste.”
Fujifilm’s proposition around Jetpress is, from the perspective of product marketing manager Mark Stephenson, about production of high quality bespoke print. This is underlined by a video shot at a customer in Germany where the print business took on a photographer’s book which had proved unprintable for offset printers, perhaps because of the detail needed in the dark shadow areas, perhaps because colour balance on the job was precarious. Tracking and dot gain, trapping and grey balance are not issues the inkjet press operator has to worry about. “Jetpress sets the standard for print,” he claims. This quality has perhaps created a perception that the technology is for that limited number of printers producing fine art books and catalogues, or perhaps one offs like photobooks. Applications in general commercial print seem to be fewer.
The absence of traditional print problems means that those running inkjet presses do not need the level of skill that an apprenticed litho press minder will have. The required skills will be more related to workflow and data than achieving an ink/water balance. As those skills become ever harder to find, the relatively simplicity of an inkjet press becomes harder to resist. Already in the US at least one printer has replaced sheetfed offset presses with an inkjet press for just this reason.
Inks are important too to Fujifilm, Stephenson pointing out that the purity of the pigments used means that the colour gamut achievable with CMYK inks is far greater than needs to be used on a litho press. Applying Fujifilm’s extended colour gamut set up delivers ever more vibrant images, hence the appeal in fine art and photobooks.
Fujifilm does use a primer to provide a consistent surface for the ink to adhere to and this enables any stock to be used. There is no adverse visual or tactile impact from inkjet printing he says.
“It is simply a different way of working. The big advantage of digital is that you can print personalised or collated work,” he says, pointing to a regular job for a diet brand where members receive postcards with encouraging slogans or images that can now deliver a bespoke message to individual clients. “It is a different way of working,” he says. “The customer starts out with an idea of how to do things, based on previous experience, but quickly finds that can be more productive to work in a different way.”
Fujifilm can print without a primer and at higher speeds (though at a slightly reduced resolution) to offer a level of flexibility for customers. Its GetFit tool will assess ink coverages and will generate a price to compare the different technologies. That will need to be expanded as Fujifilm increases its footprint in digital printing. The two-page Revoria PC1120 six-colour toner press is available now with a B2 toner press shown as a concept at Igas last year.
When quizzed on the development and how this might compare to Jetpress, Stephenson professes the sort of professional ignorance that is to be expected. “Sometimes such products never make it out of Japan,” he says.
While there are technical challenges with toner on a larger sheet, these are not insurmountable and a launch in 12 months’ time when Drupa takes place, seems feasible. “We’re not ready to talk B2,” he answers.
That is not the case for the Jetpress where there is plenty of information and experience to be shared.
Its tight registration comes from positioning the inkjet heads close to each other. There is no time for the paper to move between colours and no time for the ink to dry. “This makes it much easier to control consistency than with a litho press,” Stephenson says. It makes it easier too to hold shadow detail while also maintaining clean highlights in adjacent areas. This is why hair dye boxes suited the Primefire. Fujifilm is able too to print cartons with Jetpress, albeit on a half sheet.
The press does use a primer for all but the fastest settings though this adds 1p per sheet in cost and has no impact on the look and feel of the paper. “There is none of the waxy feel that can come with other digital technologies,” he explains.
Kyocera is also positioned against toner printing, but with the cost argument to the fore. The Taskalfa Pro 15000C is a cut sheet inkjet press limited to uncoated papers, an acceptable quality for both mono and colour printing and no need for additional drying. Consequently it runs from a 13-amp plug and has a much lower cost per page than any toner press where fusing at high temperature is a necessary feature of the technology. It is a no brainer if the work mix is appropriate.
Marc Zentjens is the Belgian brought into Kyocera to evangelise the press as commercial business development expert and establish the company as a competitor in the printing industry. “We really believe we can bring something new to the industry. We need to find its place in the market,” he says. The argument is that inkjet is a rapidly evolving technology up against existing technologies that are far more mature.
“I like litho presses. I started my career on litho presses, I like the quality and the smell you get. But today offset suppliers can only focus on efficiency – speed and quality are a given so huge effort is expended in moving from 97% to 97.2% efficiency. Toner is also mature. It does not really which manufacturer you work with, the specifications are the same. But inkjet is about growth: the first SRA3 cut sheet machine was launched only six or seven years ago, so there is constant change. We are not a mature technology, but we can delivers solutions that can do the job and more.”
Zentjens has form in this regard. After his offset years, he joined Xerox and then Océ where he became involved with a project called Niagara that became the VarioPrint iX300. That machine, as well as Canon’s ProStream, uses Kyocera heads though not the same as on the TasKalfa. That will surely change.
“As an inkjet supplier we are fully digital, we are not limited by the speed of the printing technology, only by how fast we can move paper; we are using 600dpi heads now, but can use 1200dpi heads, so we can print at very very high resolutions; and we have none of the telltale feel of toner,” he says.
Kyocera clearly has ambitions in expanding its footprint in commercial printing. A press to match the Canon iX is a strong possibility, though would not use a priming fluid as Canon currently does.
The arguments in favour of inkjet as an alternative to electrophotographic printing mount up. There is minimal warm up time in a morning compared to toner, and with inkjet the first sheet is saleable. Once set the quality is constant and repeatable; there is no fusing so energy usage is one-third of a toner press and there are no operator interventions. The lack of moving parts means servicing takes place once a quarter. Traditional jokes about engineers sharing the names of their pets with the companies they visit several times as week are no longer tenable.
Zentjens says: “We believe we can move 94% of what is printed on toner presses to inkjet. We’re printing on 52-400gsm uncoated or inkjet optimised papers. Can we print on gloss coated papers? No, but nor can anyone else. These papers are a challenge for every manufacturer.”
The advantage of high up time can easily be lost if finishing is not in tune with printing, Emea sales director Harm Jan Hulleman points out for Tecnau. It is all about optimising processes he says. “We always say that customers should think about finishing first,” he says. There are options to reduce set up times, to enable personalisation and single-copy production, especially for books, and the ability to run finishing inline or offline.
The latter is preferred as discrepancies between the speed of printing and speed of finishing will reduce efficiency in a fully inline operation. Inline suits a dedicated operation for books for example, but in a commercial printer, the offline option wins every time.
Where efficiency can be lost, he points out, is when the press has exhausted one reel and needs to change to a fresh reel. At this point a number of maintenance actions (head cleaning for example) will take place as well as loading up a new web and feeding it carefully through the press. “We have found that the average time to change a reel is 15-16 minutes which means that the press is standing still and production is not possible,” he says.
Burke is quick to challenge the time that production must be paused, but cannot argue that there will be some lost time at least.
The solution is the sort of reel change that has been essential on offset web presses for many years. Tecnau argues that its system will load up a new reel in seconds. The biggest drawback now is that not every press can withdraw or raise printheads to allow a splice to pass harmlessly on its way.
For Tecnau, the technology is not only about taking inkjet into longer production runs but also about providing the flexibility that commercial printers expect. “Our growth is in commercial printing,” Hulleman says. The Tecnau reel stand can work with new reels of the same paper or with different paper proving the versatility that is expected in commercial printing. As the first job is completed, the next reel is pasted in place, leaving a semi-spent reel to be returned to storage.
In theory the second reel is changed in less than two seconds and the press can continue as before. In practice time may be needed to load different profiles for the next job and the paper that is to be printed on.
How this happens will depend on communication along the production chain, from prepress to press and the signal from the press to the finishing line. A printed barcode can link to the production database and download the settings for the finishing line. This is not within the scope of JDF, or if it is Tecnau prefers not to use it preferring a different set of protocols. “We need more intelligence in finishing,” he says.
The same process, though in reverse, takes place at the rewind, where like a label press, the different jobs can be rewound to different cores for finishing short run jobs. In this a job that is in the middle of the printed reel and is needed urgently can be segregated from the print run by assigning it to a separate reel while printing.
Equally is is possible to run a sheeter instead of a rewind and the job becomes a sheetfed job that can make advantage of existing folders and stitching lines, though the automation that comes with inkjet will be lost.
Burke points out that Vistaprint had planned to run reels of print though an automated finishing line, but has instead found that sheeting and treating the sheet to the same guillotining and folding steps a litho sheet would go through works for its work. Conversely, Solopress puts inkjet printed reels through a Hunkeler line to deliver stacks of trimmed and cut jobs.
Where the finished product is a book and where the press can print on the same paper all day, automated or inline finishing can make sense. However, in a commercial print set up, many finishing lines fed from a printed reel, will first sheet the job before subjecting the paper to other finishing processes.
Despite Burke’s earlier intervention the cost of ink compared to offset cropped up at each location. Printers did not like what looked like an expensive part of the deal. His answer was to point to the 200 label presses and book printers with continuous presses and to say that none of them is calling up to question the price of the ink. It is what it is and if that were too expensive no supplier, let alone Screen, would be able to sell the printing press.
“And it doesn’t stop work moving from offset,” he told the Leicester audience, adding, when the subject came up the following day in Swindon, that “a price comparison is very difficult. Success depends on all of us.” Ink companies understand the need to be commercial is the point and they will not jeopardise a long term success by squeezing too hard. Success is also about buying into complete solutions and packages for what is not yet a mature market as Zetjens points out.
It is not about trying to replicate the way that litho printing has developed. Inkjet printing presents opportunities to change the way that printers work. It makes sense for example to break into a longer job to print off a few copies of a job that are needed urgently before returning to the longer run or higher pagination job. There are no plates to lift and no make ready to affect productivity. Likewise the same job can be repeated many times with no discernible impact on quality so a once a year order can become a once a month job to cut waste and storage costs.
“Ask yourself: Do you need to print the whole job at the same time?” says Burke. “Inkjet is a new print technology and with a new print technology you can do new things. That’s what should be explored.”
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