The Guide to Digital
Printing & Direct Imaging
Presses
Second Edition
Digital Dots
Technology
Guides
Copyright © 2005 Digital Dots Ltd
Introduction
This article is produced as part of an international graphic arts industry collaboration
between Digital Dots, its publishing partners and its clients.
It is part of a special project to address business and technology issues crucial to digital print
media production. The series of educational articles explains print media technologies,
business issues and market drivers for print media production, in both existing and new
markets. These articles will be published as a series of individual Technology Guides, due for
print publication in April 2006.
The Guide to JDF
The Guide to Colour Management & Proofing
The Guide to Digital Printing & Direct Imaging Presses
The Guide to CTP
The Guide to Preproduction Data Management & Quality Control
Further information is available at:
www.digitaldots.org
This project is supported by the several organisations, including the
following:
Agfa
BPIF
ME Printer
CIP4
Enfocus
Esko-Graphics
Screen
Fujifilm
Print & Publish Austria & Poland
Graphic Repro South Africa
Irish Printer
AGI Scandinavia
Indian Printer & Publisher
Il Poligrafico Italiano
Ipex 2006
Value Magazine Germany
Background & Printing
Technologies
Since the first digital colour presses were shown at Ipex 1993, the world
has changed. The digitisation of printing has happened in parallel with the
digitisation of most other media technologies and delivery methods; cameras,
TV, radio, etc. And of course we now use a medium that was but a babe in ’93
– the Internet. So, while digital printing seemed fairly revolutionary when it
first appeared and many a printer was highly sceptical, today, it’s a natural part
of a media landscape where personalised messages, on demand information
and choice is where we are going. Digital printing technologies are in the late
stages of their second generation: mature, secure, stable and yielding very
high quality print and the industry has confidence in what the presses can do.
While electrophotographic presses were the sole players in digital print in
the commercial print sector only a few years ago, in the past couple of years
Kodak and Agfa have both thrown their weight behind inkjet. It is increasingly
becoming the technology to watch.
In the beginning
When the first digital presses came onto the market, printers were not really ready for
them. The printing fraternity was getting used to the idea of customers supplying them
with digital print originals and, on top of that, had just been told it was now possible
to let digitised material flow straight onto plates. When Indigo and Xeikon launched
their first digital presses in the mid-1990s, they met with scepticism from a printing
industry still struggling to embrace the desktop shock.
Many people could see the advantages of being able to print fully variable, full colour
information. Press suppliers were rightly very enthusiastic – they had developed a
completely new type of press which would revolutionise what the printing industry
could offer: unique copies. The suppliers put a lot of effort into educating the printer,
some of whom did the same for their customers. At the same time, a new group got
into printing – many prepress companies invested in digital print capacity, already
having the capability of handling digital material. But despite all the early effort, the
breakthrough just didn’t come.
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The pioneering Xeikon and Indigo invested enormous amounts to develop
technologies they firmly believed were the future, choosing two different strategies to
capture market share. Xeikon signed OEM agreements with several other printer, press
and prepress suppliers. Agfa, Xerox and IBM developed and sold proprietary front end
systems for the Xeikon print engines. A bit of reshuffling in the spring of 2000 saw
Man Roland taking over Agfa’s OEM agreement and launching its own line of digital
presses.
Indigo, on the other hand, preferred to reap the fruits of its digital press development
alone and has never OEM’ed its technology to other parties.
During the 1990s Xeikon and Indigo remained the only suppliers in the full colour
digital print production segment. The big turning point was Drupa 2000, when
several others, notably Heidelberg and Xerox got onboard. They saw a potentially
huge market, which they could not afford to ignore. Technical developments and
some business reshuffling since have seen digital print become a serious market,
both for vendors and users. Presses are reliable, producing top quality, and users now
understand what digital colour is really about. It’s not just another printing method
– it’s about new business opportunities.
Press categories
Electrophotographic technologies
Putting subjective print quality aside and looking instead at issues such as speed, cost
and capacity, there are today two main categories of commercial electrophotographic
presses. Firstly, there is the group of top-end devices outputting around 60–110+ A4
pages a minute. This group includes second and third generation machines, conceptual
descendants of the first digital colour presses launched a decade ago. These presses
require a certain level of operator skill and involvement, and are definitely designed for
graphic arts applications, not office printing. They are fairly flexible as far as substrates,
formats, workflow and inline finishing are concerned. Monthly capacities for these
presses are generally from 500,000 to 1.5 million pages. The main suppliers are
Xerox, Kodak, HP Indigo, Xeikon and Canon. Xeikon’s 5000 press, launched in 2004,
is designed for monthly production volumes of up to three million pages. Prices in
this category start at a couple of hundred thousand Euros. Many presses are between
¤200,000 and ¤500,000 and some, like the Xerox Docucolor iGen3, and the HP Indigo
ws3200 a couple of hundred thousand euros more.
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A new market segment emerged a couple of years ago, for users who want to get into
digital colour printing, but at a lower level of cost and capacity. At entry level there
are several devices producing about 30 pages a minute from suppliers such as Canon,
Xerox, Océ, Toshiba, Konica Minolta and Ricoh. These machines are not built to
run 24/7, generally print on substrates up to about 250 g and have limited finishing
options. Prices start at around ¤30,000. These types of devices come out of the office
copier market and are sometimes referred to as “green button” engines: they require
little operator involvement beyond pushing the print button, but they offer less
functionality than their top end siblings.
Inkjet engines
Inkjet is gaining ground. The resolution is still not quite what electrophotography
offers, but it’s getting better, and there are now high speed inkjet production devices
capable of printing 300 x 1200 dpi, compared to the normal electrophotography
resolution of 600 x 600 dpi. Indeed, speed is one of the advantages of inkjet printing
– these presses can do speeds that it’s hard to imagine electrophotography ever
matching. And while the trade off between print quality and speed is still there in
inkjet presses, it is slowly becoming less of an issue. The quality is a particular problem
when printing small text, in that the ink bleeds, creating softer edges than with other
printing methods. Inkjet presses are still used mostly for industrial applications,
such as packaging, and transactional printing, but as the quality improves so will the
number of viable applications. Newspaper publishers are increasingly interested in this
technology for printing newspapers on demand in remote markets.
An inkjet press transfers the printed image without the imaging engine physically
touching the substrate, so it’s possible to print on a much wider range of materials than
with a press where the substrate passes through a cylinder nip (although not all inkjet
presses are designed with this type of flexibility). The two main suppliers of inkjet
presses are Kodak (the Versamark range) and Agfa, who after getting out of digital
printing when it ended its OEM agreement with Xeikon in 2000, in 2004 got back in
through the acquisition of Dotrix, producer of the now eponymous industrial inkjet
press.
Electrophotographic technology
Most digital colour presses use some sort of electrophotographic method to generate
the page image. There are some variations in how electrophotography works but
the different technologies operate along common principles. A drum covered with
a photo-electrical conductor is charged and the conducting material is then exposed
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to varying intensities of light from a laser or LED. Where the light hits the drum the
surface material loses its charge and acts as a carrier for the image. Charged toner or
ink is then attracted to the image areas of the drum. Océ has its very own technology,
called Océ Direct Imaging, which uses magnetism to generate the image and removes
unwanted toner from the drum.
Different presses use different methods to transfer the toner/ink to the paper or other
substrate. Often there is an intermediate medium, sometimes referred to as a blanket.
This is true in for example the Xerox Docucolor 2000 series, which has what Xerox
calls a Digital Blanket. In the iGen3, Xerox has instead a form of patented imaging
carrier that transfers the image directly onto the paper. In Xeikon engines the drum is
imaged and the toner then transferred directly to the paper. In top-end Canon and Océ
presses, the toner is also transferred directly from the imaged surface onto the paper, in
Canon’s case from the imaged drum.
Two manufacturers have presses combining electrophotography with an offset-
like method for transferring the printed image onto the paper. HP Indigo’s print
technology transfers the ink onto a blanket cylinder, just as in offset, and from there
onto the paper. Kodak’s Nexpress 2100 Plus also uses a patented blanket cylinder called
Nexblanket to transfer the ink. However, in most other respects the Nexpress and
Indigo methods are quite different.
Single or multiple?
These presses also differ in their toner/ink transfer process: single or multiple pass.
Single pass technology transfers the entire page onto the paper in one go. All four, five,
six or seven colour separations are imaged or transferred one on top of the other and
transferred via an intermediary carrier or blanket to the substrate in a single printing
pass. Multiple pass technologies transfer each separation to the paper individually,
either as the paper passes through the press in a straight path, passing one blanket
cylinder or carrier cylinder after another. Another method is to hold the paper in place
around a cylinder, which rotates four times (or more, depending on the number of
separations) and with each rotation another separation transfers to the paper.
Simplex and duplex
All electrophotographic presses can print on both sides of the paper. This duplex
printing is achieved in several ways. Usually the paper is turned upside down and
printed on the other side so that what was the leading edge of the sheet when printing
the first side, becomes the trailing edge when printing the second. This method
requires precision and accurate turning. Xeikon solves the duplex issue by printing
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both sides simultaneously – Xeikon web presses have toner units on both sides of the
paper web.
The Nexpress 2100 Plus has a different type of turning mechanism, unique to this
digital press. The sheet is not only turned upside down but also horizontally, so that
the sheet keeps the same leading edge as it is printed on both sides. The Nexpress does
not utilise conventional work and twist, but rather the sheet enters the first print unit
with the same edge leading for printing each side. According to the supplier, this avoids
the need for special algorithms for the adjustment of print register.
In all the top-end sheetfed digital presses, except the Nexpress 2100 Plus, both sides of
the sheets are printed on the fly. Both sides of a sheet are printed before the next sheet
enters the first printing unit, resulting in a steady stream of sheets to the delivery. In the
Nexpress Plus a number of sheets (less than 10) printed on one side are collected in a
tray prior to being printed on the other. They are then stacked up in the delivery at the
same rate.
Toner or ink
All presses have to use the toner or ink supplied by the press manufacturer. In fact,
the printing methods generally require purpose made and patented toner or ink for
the presses to be able to print at all. Most of the presses use toner, with varying toner
particle sizes. Many of these toners are so fine that they flow much as a liquid does.
The main players in electrophotography
Xeikon
In 2002, Xeikon’s digital colour press division was acquired by Punch, at the time a
relatively new player in the graphic arts. In the spring of 2005, a Punch subsidiary was
formed, trading under the name of Punch Graphix, which now owns Xeikon as well as
a prepress division. When Xeikon was bought up in 2002, it ended its OEM strategy.
The OEM strategy, which saw Xeikon through its costly initial years, had caused such
intense sales channel conflicts as to seriously undermine the company’s viability.
Xeikon manufactures duplex web fed digital presses for the commercial printing
market, but also has a single sided press for label applications. In 2000 the company
made an ill-fated foray into the sheetfed market, but the product was withdrawn in
2002. The company’s latest press is the Xeikon 5000, which prints up to 130 A4 pages
per minute and is built to produce over three million impressions per month. This
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web press is one of the most versatile engines available, capable of producing anything
from banners, through to multiple page gatefold work and posters at high speed and
looking just lovely.
It is a testament to great technology that this pioneer survived the difficult years. In
its deliberate commitment to niche applications lies Xeikon’s future. Apart from its
ability to move quickly and work very intimately with customers, Xeikon is a small
company and does not need to support countless management strata, so it could offer
considerably more latitude when it comes to investment, service and cost per page,
compared to its larger competitors. If printing presses are like cars, Xeikon is the AC
Cobra of the digital printing market.
HP Indigo
The other pioneer, Indigo, was acquired by computer and printer giant HP in 2002.
There is no doubt that this deal was vital for Indigo’s survival, as competitors such
as Xerox and Nexpress moved into the digital colour printing market. For HP, the
speed and quality of the Indigo presses was particularly attractive. HP already offered
both inkjet and xerographic printers, but Indigo gave HP a route into the commercial
printing market. In 2005 HP acquired Scitex Vision, providing it with inkjet technology
for the superwide format market.
From the start Indigo developed both sheet and web fed presses, the former usually
for commercial printers and the latter for industrial applications such as labels and
packaging. This dual philosophy still holds and HP Indigo has by far the widest range
of devices and applications of any digital press supplier. HP claim to have shipped more
than 40% of colour production printers in the global market in 2005. There are now 3.4
billion pages printed annually on HP Indigo machines.
The latest presses are the HP Indigo press 5000 and 3050. The 5000 was the first press
developed jointly by HP and Indigo, and the 3050 was an improved version of the
HP Indigo 3000 series. They were both launched at Drupa 2004. At Ipex the web fed
w3250 is being introduced for printing at up to 136 full colour A4 pages per minute.
Xerox
Xerox has been in the digital monochrome business for over twenty years. Its first
venture into colour was an OEM deal with Xeikon in the late 1990s, for Xerox to sell
web fed colour presses using the Xeikon print engine. Xerox soon launched its own
sheetfed digital colour presses, the DocuColor 2000 series, and since then has stuck to
producing sheetfed machines. At Ipex in 2002 early orders were taken for the iGen 3,
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a third generation high volume machine, which has since been very successful, with
currently over 500 installed units. The company now considers four of its products to
fall into the category “digital production presses”; the Xerox iGen3, the Docucolors
5252, 6060 and 7000/8000. Xerox has recently introduced a new monochrome printer,
the 4110, and the iGen3 110 outputting 110 pages per minute.
Xerox may not be the market leader, but when it comes to market engagement this
company can’t be faulted. Xerox is building a new business model, services led
and taking it away from Xerox traditional hardware core. This is smart because, as
Armando Zagalo de Lima, President of Xerox Europe puts it: “you have different
sizes of shoes depending on your specialty area”. Never so true as in digital print. The
company has restructured to provide customers with a single point of contact through
which everything else interacts with clients. The single point is Global Services, and
under that comes Office and Production, including digital printing.
Kodak
In 2004 Kodak acquired Heidelberg Digital and Nexpress Solutions from Heidelberg,
having originally conceived Nexpress as a joint venture with Heidelberg. The first
Nexpress digital colour press was shown at Drupa 2000, although it did not become
commercially available until Print ‘01 in Chicago. Technologically the joint venture
was a match made in printing heaven, with Heidelberg supplying extensive experience
in sheetfed printing, and Kodak supplying imaging expertise. Heidelberg developed the
press’s mechanics and Kodak the image origination. Heidelberg’s roots in traditional
printing gave the company a slightly different view of service, which has followed the
press into Kodak. Many machines originating in office applications generate revenue
for their manufacturers through click charges. The user pays for each printed page
(click), and after a set number of clicks a technician arrives to service the machine.
Conversely the Nexpress 2100 has over 40 parts that an operator can replace when
necessary, thus controlling costs: it’s cheaper to use an old imaging cylinder for
printing a few Power Point slides, and use a new one for more important high end
production.
In 2003 Kodak expressed its intent to focus on commercial print as one of its three
key markets and in 2004 it launched its Graphic Communications Group. Having
dropped shedloads of cash to acquire KPG, Scitex Versamark, Creo and Nexpress,
Kodak has bought itself a space in the market, although how it intends to occupy that
space remains to be seen. What is abundantly clear is Kodak’s intention to become the
most comprehensive solutions provider in the prepress and digital printing industries
for mono and colour output, across the whole market in environments that output
production volumes. There are some 9,500 Kodak branded print units out there,
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and although the company won’t say how they are configured – singly or in variable
multiples – it’s enough to provide a considerable growth path.
Canon, like Xerox, was originally a copier supplier but today the company has a clear
graphic arts strategy and has been very successful with its CLC range of production
presses. Canon bridges the gap between top-end devices and entry level machines. The
CLC 5100 and CLC 4000 are sheetfed presses that produce up to 51 and 40 A4 pages
a minute respectively. This range also includes machines for entry-level applications,
most notably the 32 page per minute CLC 3200. The CLC 5100 and 4000 are sold by
Kodak as well. The two companies announced a cooperation within digital print at
Drupa 2004, the aim of which is to develop a broad range of digital colour solutions
that will bridge office document workflows and commercial printing workflows, to
make the transition seamless for users.
Canon believes it has a “breadth of offering to the industry that is strongest in the
market” and that no other company “has demonstrated the same commitment as
Canon” according to Adam Poole, Canon’s Marketing Manager for Professional
Solutions in the UK. How much of Canon’s €24,422 million turnover comes
from digital print is hard to say, but more interesting are the rate of growth of its
contribution and the recent opening of a warehouse in Maasvlakte in the Netherlands
to centralise and support Canon’s European IT and professional print business
operations. Presumably the rate of revenue growth from digital print is enough make
investment worthwhile. Compared to its competitors, Canon has moved slowly so far,
but with a new colour press on the way (see chapter 7), relationships with Kodak and
EFI and very deep pockets, Canon is becoming a force to be reckoned with.
Inkjet
Inkjet presses are mainly used for industrial printing. There are two main inkjet
printing technologies: drop-on-demand and continuous flow. The technologies
are distinguished by how the drops of ink hit the printing surface. The two leading
suppliers have developed quite different approaches suitable for different applications.
Drop on demand technology causes the ink to expand so that droplets are forced
through an inkjet nozzle. Expansion occurs either because of electrical stimulation or
as a result of heat and is controlled so that ink droplets are forced through the nozzle
individually rather than in a steady stream, which is harder to control.
A continuous flow inkjet head allows the ink to flow continuously through an
electrostatic field. This field charges some of the ink droplets, depending on what is to
be printed so that a second electrostatic field can then direct the droplets to the print
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surface. This combination of charger and deflector means that droplet placement
and frequency can be controlled with extreme precision so this technology is capable
of very high quality (albeit at slow speeds). It offers a broad colour gamut, colour
conformity and overall quality and is used in a wide range of applications. It has been
especially popular for proofing applications. Continuous flow technology is more
sensitive than drop on demand and can be vulnerable to clogging, particularly if the
machine is not in regular use.
Kodak
In December 2003 it was announced that Eastman Kodak Company would acquire
Scitex Digital Printing, a subsidiary of Scitex Corporation, for US$250 million.
Interestingly, ten years earlier Kodak actually sold its Diconix monochrome narrow
web inkjet operations in Dayton to Scitex, which was the basis for Scitex Digital
Printing. Of course a lot of product development has happened since then, and Kodak
hardly bought back the same company.
Today Kodak’s Versamark products are built around high-speed continuous tone
inkjet engines, and the company offers monochrome, spot and full colour web fed
configurations of its Versamark press lines. The Kodak Versamark V-series includes
the VJ 1000, a monochrome press, the VT3000, VX 5000 and 5000e, which can all
be configured for 4+4 colour. The VX5000e has the higher resolution of 300 x 1200
dpi. The Versamark D-series include about a dozen imprinting products of varying
widths, used to print variable information on- or offline. Kodak does not publicise
installation figures for specific products, so we cannot say how many Versamarks are
in production in the world.
Agfa
Four years after Agfa sold its Chromapress activities (including an OEM print engine
from Xeikon) and exited digital printing, the Belgian giant re-entered the game. In
January 2004, Agfa announced an agreement with Barco to acquire all assets and staff
of Barco’s Dotrix spin-off company. At Drupa 2000 Barco had shown a prototype of
its industrial inkjet press. In September 2001 Dotrix was established as a company to
develop and sell the product, which was officially launched in 2002.
This press, now called the Dotrix, is unique in that it has print heads across the width
of the paper web. The technology is called SPICE (Single Pass Inkjet Colour Engine)
and each individual print head cartridge has a printing width of 52 cm. The heads are
mounted in a frame above the web in a staggered arrangement, so the maximum total
print width is 630 mm (twelve cartridges). The advantage of the construction is that
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the print heads don’t move, which gives stability as well as speed. Top printing speed is
24 metres per second, resulting in 907 square metres per hour/hr.
Dotrix is suitable for industrial print applications such as wallpaper and floorcovering,
speciality packaging, security printing and specialised printing applications such as
mobile phone covers. There are currently 12 installed Dotrix in different applications:
labels (4), point-of-purchase and displays (2), packaging (2) and specialty printing (4).
Under Agfa’s umbrella the scope for development is huge. It is interesting and no doubt
significant that Agfa chooses to invest in high speed inkjet, and it’s a fair assumption
that Agfa will look to move this technology into the realm of commercial print over
the years to come.
Screen also has an inkjet engine previewed at Print ’05 and to be shown at Ipex. The
new Truepress Jet520 is based on piezo drop on demand technology printing and has a
64 mm web width at 720 x 320 dpi, with variable dot size. This single pass continuous
feed engine prints 64 metres per minute to print 420 A4 pages per hour (pph) and is
based on Epson heads with Screen engineering and manufacturing.
Conclusion
The press market has broadened considerably in the last few years, and today there
is a digital printing system for every conceivable type of application, organisation
and budget. The users have confidence in the products, and are beginning to reap the
benefits of variable data printing, as people start to use print more imaginatively. The
press vendors remaining in this market are all big and stable, and, as far as anyone
can tell, committed to digital press development, including front ends. And while
development will carry on into the foreseeable future, the products on the market
today, and those introduced tomorrow, all provide reliable printing at a high quality.
In other words, the technology is no longer a reason not to get into digital colour
printing.
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