It may seem odd now to think of Heidelberg as a supplier of inkjet presses. Yet in less than a year’s time the company hopes that this perception will be commonplace and that inkjet will sit alongside toner and offset presses in its portfolio.
It might prove as transformative for Heidelberg as the shift in the 1960s and 1970s from the world’s leading purveyor of letterpress presses to a dominant player in litho printing. That shift was eased by styling the first GTOs with levers and bars to make machines familiar to printers. That is not going to happen this time, litho printing will remain unrivalled for longer runs and larger formats.
The transformation has already begun with the surprise introduction of the Jetfire 50 at Drupa in 2024. This is the result of a partnership with Canon, a step extended with the upcoming introduction of a B2 inkjet press.
Heidelberg’s sheetfed B2 inkjet press will be the Jetfire 75. The first example will be delivered to the Home of Print showroom in Wiesloch in July for demonstration in September and for controlled installations to begin towards the end of this year.
The press is identical to Canon’s iV7 but with Heidelberg software, Prinect Touch and the like. If there are to be modifications, say in the feeder or delivery for example, these will come later. It seems odd to think that Ricoh’s Z75 B2 inkjet press can come with a Heidelberg feeder while Heidelberg’s own machine does not.
The press will have Canon’s ColorGrip priming fluid and Canon inks despite Heidelberg having a development lab working on aqueous ink formulations. There is currently no press in the portfolio either for commercial printing or for labels and packaging that uses aqueous inks. If nothing else this is an indication that Heidelberg is taking inkjet seriously.
It has a long history with the digital printing technology. The first evidence was a concept shown at Drupa at the turn of the millennium with inkjet heads mounted in a standard press frame and printing out a page of back only text. It was never seen again.
A decade later Heidelberg acquired a company called CSAT which had developed machines to print on packaging, specifically pharmaceutical packaging including the foil backing used for tablets. This led to the Linoprint L able to print four colours at 600dpi for the labels sector. It was not a great success. However, it remained part of the Gallus line up even after the venture was sold to Markem Imaje in 2014.
Some of that experience emerged in the Labelfire 340, a true inkjet press for label printing based on the Gallus ECS340 platform and using Fujifilm Dimatix printheads. While some were sold, it was not the hoped for success.
Its longevity is unlike the B1 sheetfed Primefire, unveiled to the world at Drupa in 2016 as the epitome of inkjet printing and dominating Heidelberg’s stand at the show. It had a B1 format, was not restricted to a limited range of formats thanks to a central imaging drum where sheets were held by a mechanism with all the engineering intricacy of a Patek Phillipe wristwatch. It was just as exclusive and as expensive as the Swiss made watches, and consequently just as rarely seen. Heidelberg says ten machines were sold. Only two remain in use and those have reached the end of life.
Those companies that were successful with it used the press for their most demanding clients who could come and pass jobs without the pressure of disrupting production elsewhere. It was the world’s most expensive proofing press.
Others might print mixed sheets of cartons for colour critical work such as hair dyes without concerns about balancing colours across a sheet. Ultimately this market was not large enough to sustain production and Heidelberg did not have the financial resources to wait for the market to appreciate its technology.
Nor could Heidelberg wait any longer to be part of the shift to inkjet printing. It is understood that a project was underway as Drupa 2024 approached but it would not be ready for the show. And it was clear that with other suppliers ready with a slew of inkjet machines, Heidelberg needed a response. The B3 market for litho presses, already reduced by toner machines, needed a faster more productive digital press offering litho quality, namely an inkjet press. Heidelberg looked at what was available and struck a deal with Canon.
When the announcement was made on the eve of Drupa that Heidelberg would OEM the very successful Canon iX3200 there was universal surprise. The cover was removed on what Heidelberg calls the Jetfire 50 and immediately began fielding questions and inquiries. Heidelberg has so far sold 30 machines, ten to a single customer in China, Shengda and more in Switzerland than any other country.
Switzerland has been the last bastion for two-page litho printing, partly because of a Swiss emphasis on quality and partly because in a country with four official languages, each job needed to be repeated in different language versions. The Jetfire 50 delivers the requirements that Swiss printers need with the reassurance of working with Heidelberg and with its Prinect ecosystem.
That digital ecosystem is key to Heidelberg’s approach to inkjet. What it calls a data lake that sits in the cloud will provide a range of services from consultancy, to performance improvement and to identify maintenance issues. It was also host Prinect Touch Free, the latest evolution of the Prinect workflow which is just being rolled out now. Four companies are active as pilot customers.
Within this the data lake will calculate which jobs should proceed along which production path whether litho, inkjet or toner with dynamic updates as the inevitable changes to production occur. This is what Heidelberg is calling ‘autonomous hybrid print production’.
Senior vice president of the digital print ecosystem Christopher Berti says that integration like this “offers the highest growth potential for Heidelberg and our customers”.
In Heidelberg’s vision of the commercial print plant of the near future, decision making will take place using Prinect Touch Free. Jobs arrive and are checked to be good to go. The Pathfinder step parses the job against the equipment that might be used to produce it and then the Scheduler directs the digital file accordingly. This step is dynamic, constantly updating as new jobs with different demands or priorities arrive or others that are expected to arrive do not. It is to be a full automated touch less operation introducing artificial intelligence that will extend to finishing equipment and to packaging workflows over time.
Prinect already operates in a JDF enabled world with a Heidelberg DFE for digital printing, colour management and MIS. It also has deep application knowledge, says Berti, which is integral to Prinect.
The need for this development as well as for a productive digital press was highlighted by research into the pain points felt by customers. Heidelberg combined machine operating data from the 12,000 litho machines connected to its cloud as well as more in-depth research with 200 customers around the world.
The data showed that 50% of jobs did not reach 1,000 copies and 66% were fewer than 2000 copies. “These jobs can and will migrate to digital” says Berti. An indication of this comes at Saxoprint, one of Heidelberg’s largest litho press customers. Its parent company Cewe is an extensive user of Indigo presses now at Saxoprint “to further improve efficiency, the current offset production is being supplemented by digital printing printing capabilities”. These are inkjet, led by Canon’s ProStream and iX3200. Others in the online print world are of the same opinion. Flyeralarm is using its Jetfire50 on the most economical lowest ink usage setting and has had no complaints and is interested in the Jetfire 75.
Further digging into the research results found that many commercial printers already derive 50% of their revenues from digital printing but that this covers only 10% of the page volume that is printed, leading to the inescapable conclusion that digital jobs deliver more money per sheet. And the only way to cope with the influx of short run digital jobs is to automate as much as possible.
Aside from the margin per job issue, other main points from the report were the labour crisis and the needs for automation, 53% identified a shortage of skilled workers as key, the need for automation and the sharp increase in short run jobs allied to a rise in the number of jobs to be processed. Digital printing enables printers to address this in ways that litho cannot “and is why workflow is so important”.
It is why too Heidelberg has needed a way to produce jobs that fall in the gap between the ultra low runs that toner is good for and the medium runs where litho excels. This is inkjet territory.
The Jetfire 50 though is not enough. It is limited by the format Berti says, able to produce A4 or smaller products, it not suited to calendars or posters for example. Packaging is effectively excluded not just by the format but also by a paper path that includes a heated drum precluding the use of stiffer materials than 350gsm.
On the other hand the Jetfire 50 can be operated by someone without litho skills and only 5-10 days training and could print 60 million sheets a year. It sits both near line and inline finishing with Heidelberg linking to a Tecnau cut stack device and CP Bourg bookletmakers and perfect binders. Others will follow.
Inline finishing, perhaps from Bourg, will be available too for the B2 press. It has a similar potential on sheets per year, but thanks to a flat sheet path, these can be up to 450gsm. The design concept would allow for even thicker materials as the specification for Canon’s corrugated printer shows. Heidelberg is not showing interest in corrugated, but a future B1 press for carton printing could be of interest. There is little appetite from converters for digital printing currently, so there is no pressure to deliver such a press.
The Jetfire 75 is not the answer as it is only a four-colour press and a seven-colour machine would be needed to cover the range of spot colours that packaging requires. Canon’s design has slots in the printing unit for additional inkjet heads, though not currently available.
The schedule for the introduction of the Jetfire 75 has a machine delivered to the Home of Print showroom in July for internal familiarisation and training, followed in September by customer demonstrations and thereafter the first controlled installations.
The cost will be less than an XL75 long perfector, but ink costs will be more, but there are no plates and less, if any, waste. This is why Heidelberg will put the figures through the grinder to analyse the work mix and work out what combination of toner, inkjet and litho presses will fit like a tailored suit to which printers.
The total cost of ownership of the litho press will remain much lower than for the digital machine, but for one area. A single operator can run two digital presses, making labour costs considerable lower, and lower still when skill levels needed are not as great.
