Kodak believes that half the plates it ships in 2021 will be part of the Sonora process-free plate family as Covid-19 accelerates a trend towards more sustainable workflows and eats into demand for litho print.
The company is currently running beta tests at 100 sites worldwide for its Sonora Xtra version of the plate. This is the most robust version of the development on press plates to date and is positioned to ensure that Kodak remains ahead of the competition in this area.
Even before the trials have come to an end, John O’Grady, senior vice president for traditional print, says that that a quarter of those testing the plate have agreed to continue using it after the test phase ends.
The lockdowns around the world have extended, rather than stopped the testing period as it has been impossible in most instances to have a Kodak engineer work alongside a press operator in the print customer. “It has been difficult to get that sort of access to the press,” he says, “which we need to test the product fully.”
Nevertheless, through remote meetings technology, it has been possible to communicate with the guinea pig printers and the design for Sonora Xtra has been locked down ready for active sales to begin. “We reckon that one out of every two plates we ship next year will be process-free,” he says.
And while the pandemic has hit sales, delivering a severe blow in March, volumes have been rebounding in the summer months. “There was a robust come back in sales during July and August,” says Jeff Zellmer, vice president global sales and strategy “Some areas remain a little slow: short run digital for example, which serves the hospitality and hotel sector and, like O’Grady, Kodak sales teams have found it difficult to meet printers on their premises. “A lot of customers in the US and Europe in particular say they are not taking onsite visits, at least until the end of this year,” he adds.
The crisis has also accelerated plans in the software part of the business where interest in Prinergy on Demand, its software as a service version of the well established workflow is at an all time high. This is starting to use machine learning and artificial intelligence, a move cemented through deeper partnership with Munich software house PerfectPattern.
This gives Kodak access to the source code used in PerfectPattern’s PrintOne imposition and planning application to achieve a tighter integration than before. Benchmarking will lead to better comparisons between users and learning from one company’s experience with another, Todd Bigger, vice president, software, says. Kodak has big plans to expand Prinergy’s role into all aspects of a print business, connecting to presses and finishing departments as well as prepress. “It will identify cost savings and bottlenecks, how much ink is being used along with a suggestion of how to reduce it.
“More and more customers want to eliminate the upfront capital costs,” says Bigger. “Prinergy on Demand provides access to simultaneous upgrades as part of the monthly subscription and new users get 90 days use of a solutions architect to work to build the system with automation, APIs and so accelerate the move away from the existing workflow, rather than a printer having to run two systems alongside each other for 12-18 months, as happens in many cases.”
