Ricoh is to introduce gold and silver toners as extra colours for users of its Pro C7200X five-colour press. Users already have the option of clear and white toners and neon toners, the former being more popular than the latter. Now gold and silver are expected to become as popular as white and clear toners.
“There has been a demand from the Ricoh customer base for gold and silver,” says Andy Campbell, application and innovation manager at Ricoh’s customer experience centre in Telford. He has been putting samples of the toner through its paces to understand what the impact is on different papers and when used in conjunction with CMY colours to create pearlescent and other effects.
“We wanted to show something at Drupa, had that gone ahead,” he continues. “It’s something that has been on the roadmap for a long, long time.
“The question is Is there a demand for it, and I think there is. But printers will have to go out and sell it.”
Despite the combined efforts of Xerox and HP Indigo, and to a lesser extent Kodak, to sell higher value metallic toners, the appreciation among designers is low. Not enough have seen what can be done.
Campbell is trying to create a sample set to show how the extra metallics can be used to best effect. The combination of standard colours and the new toner seems to work better with the gold, he says. “And solid areas seem to work better than picking out fine lines in silver,” he says. “We have a couple of designs using gold and silver together with white on coloured papers. It really does bring a design to life. Printing gold on top of white seems to give the gold greater luminescence.”
He has also put the sheets through the Duplo Dusense to achieve even greater impact. Expected applications included social stationery, calendars, photobooks and greetings cards.
The quality is the equivalent to the gold and silver toners used on the Xerox Iridesse. This is a machine but by Fujifilm in Japan and which has been sold exclusively by Xerox outside Japan. However, the joint technology agreement between Xerox and Fujifilm comes to an and at the close of this month, enabling Fujifilm to partner with others on its technology and the Japanese company has already reorganised its business to account for this shift, with further announcements due at the start of July.
Ricoh has samples of the toners in the Telford CEC and will have samples at its sales offices, but will only be supplying the gold and silver toners across Europe from July.
