Last year Kyocera announced availability of its Taskalfa C15000, a first cutsheet inkjet press intended for production print applications. Others will follow.
While Kyocera has had no direct exposure to print businesses, its multi-function printers are among the biggest sellers in their class and Kyocera supplies printheads for any number of widely used inkjet presses. These range from narrow web presses for labels to high speed web presses from Canon.
Kyocera’s first machine for this market is neither. It expands the brand sold through dealers as MFPs. And it is opening up a new sector for inkjet presses. It looks like a toner machine though at 150 duplex pages a minute is faster than pretty much any single-engine EP machine. The Taskalfa is rated at 1 million pages a month and delivers the sort of colour printing that is a match for continuous feed inkjet – it has consistency and prints on the same papers.
It is not as yet a litho substitute press, though in its first iteration Canon’s i300 machine was equally limited. Canon’s machine has evolved to become a machine that needs to be considered for litho substitute work. If Kyocera has ambitions in this direction they are definitely for the future.
The opportunity for this machine is with transactional printers. The cut sheet machine can take on runs that are below the sensible threshold for any continuous feed press and can handle the reprints that are almost inevitable to replace this mailings that have ruined during the process. Rather than put these back on the CF press, it makes sense to run a couple of hundred copies off on the Kyocera inkjet which has been colour matched to the bigger press.
Many companies will use a Riso press for this purpose, but that has limitations Chris Matthews argues. Riso’s inkjet technology is a proprietary approach that is designed for ease of use and very ephemeral non demanding applications.
It may, however, be a while before prospects can put this to the test. The machine was announced with Kyocera’s showroom between lockdowns. Since then it has remained closed and while there are a few machines in place, site visits are just as difficult. Samples are available both from Matthews and from ASL, the first distributor appointed to handle the machine in the UK. “Interest has been high,” he says. “We are producing samples from customer files and calculating the costs for them.”
As well as an all-in click charge model which will appeal to CRDs, there is a second model which Matthews says will offer greater flexibility to commercial printers. This is based on a monthly charge for service and consumables, but not ink. Ink is charged separately, encouraging printers to set their own prices and to made adjustments in coverage and quality to hit the levels a customer wants. Quality and ink consumption can be adjusted in the Fiery DFE.
This enables a printer to run the inkjet press at more competitive rates for lower areas of coverage than is possible with a toner press operating with a click charge regardless of the amount of colour on each page. It is the same appeal that Xerox has exploited with its Baltoro compared to an iGen.
“We are hopeful that with a lot of stuff on the go, we will be busy as lockdowns ease up,” says Matthews. “It has been received well by those that have seen it. It seems that once it goes in it generates opportunities for the users because the running costs are so competitive compared to toner. A couple of early customers have indicated they are considering a second or third machine for this purpose.”
The Taskalfa is running with Kyocera’s 600dpi piezo printheads. The Japanese developer has released details of a 1200dpi head that is also faster, indicating that the journey for this machine is not finished.
Other developers will be watching keenly to see whether Kyocera can take market share from their toner machines. Currently it is the only supplier with an inkjet press in the sector, sitting well above Riso’s ComColor and less expensive than the Xerox Baltoro or Canon i300 presses and with a different position in the market than these presses.
The challenge may well come from machines using Memjet printheads. The first generation of presses like Delphax suffered from the limitations of the Versapass printhead. With the DuraLink printhead guaranteed to handle 200 litres of ink before needing replacement, a developer has an opportunity to build a press around this capability – though Memjet’s ink pricing policy may restrict this.
