Kodak will carefully manage placements of its new Ultra 520 inkjet press which received its first public airing at Hunkeler Innovation Days. The first machine is destined for a North American printer while the machine on the stand in Switzerland will not be returning to the US but will be installed in Europe. Exactly where was being worked out last week.
The press performed faultlessly during the event, producing the same quality whether at an inching pace or running to the full 150m/min the press is capable of. At this speed its quality was equivalent to 200lpi screen resolution litho job. Whether because of its litho heritage or for other reasons, Kodak refers to quality using familiar terms rather than drops per inch.
“This is a big event for Kodak,” says CEO Jim Continenza. “We are coming to the offset market. We know the market and we can help customers mitigate the risk associated with aluminium supply.”
Most printers will be unaware of any risk, nor of the carbon impact of mining the ore, extracting the metal, rolling, coating and shipping the plates compared to moving bottles of water based ink. Kodak as one of the major plate manufacturers believes this will be one of the key triggers for the transition to inkjet printing.
“We want to replace our own product, not let somebody else do it,” says senior vice president for digital print Randy Vandagriff. “We have matched offset on the quality required, with a larger colour gamut and now at speed. The Ultra 520 is a product to really turn offset on its head.
“Anything that can be printed on a dry toner machine can be printed on a 520.”
However, this is a completely different proposition to dry toner printing. Continenza says that the placement customers would be expected to use 15,000 litres of ink a year, stressing that the press will be targeting litho jobs not just migration from one style of digital printing to another. “We need to place the first units in the right locations,” he says. “If people don’t have enough digital print volume, then they switch from offset pages.”
There will be further versions of the high quality technology to target markets other than commercial print pages, with the 410m/min Prosper 7000 already looking to consumer newspaper pages where the production window for daily titles has limited the opportunity for inkjet.
In short Kodak’s future is around inkjet and where its investment dollars are going. This spells the end for its investment in electrophotostatic printing, the Nexpress, Nexfinity and Ascend presses. “We have chosen not to manufacture these at this time,” says Vandagriff. “There may be the opportunity to bring them back, but for us, it’s a question of where we best invest our capital. We have to make some choices and inkjet is our future.”
