Photo products are an important new application for digital presses. Simon Eccles examines how some manufacturers are developing special models, while others are helping with dedicated software.
As soon as high quality digital colour printers appeared, it was obvious that they could be used for photographic work, long before digital consumer cameras appeared. In the mid-1990s Indigo and Xeikon were already showing how early digital cameras could be used with digital presses to output personalised photo products. Since then the real world has caught up with their accurate predictions, as digital cameras came to dominate the consumer photographic market in the 2000s. We’re now in a second phase as everyone’s mobile phone can take still pictures and increasingly movies.
The ease of viewing photographs on a phone, computer or tablet has seen a huge tail off in the old conventional develop and print business. Strangely, this is good news for digital printers. With ordinary photographic prints in decline, people will notice something that’s different, such as a nicely presented and bound photo book, with captions and probably fancy borders and backgrounds. Personalised calendars are also big business, followed by the fashion for box-framed canvas prints.
The past few years have seen digital press manufacturers increasingly offering special modifications specifically to improve the appearance of photographic prints. Typically these are changes to the toners and front end software. HP has long been unique in its ability to offer six and seven colours on its various Indigo digital presses. Its Photo Package is based on the 5000 series presses (and later 5500/5600 models) with optional special inks, a Photo Enhancement Server (which can automatically fix common problems in images) and a high performance front end that can drive several presses.
Full time photo operations like Harrier (see page 34) tend to use the faster Indigo 7000/7500 series presses. It will be interesting to see if the newly announced, highly productive but more expensive B2 10000 models also attract this type of user. Apart from the obvious productivity benefits of B2, the larger sheets would also allow easier production of A4 books in the popular landscape format, as well as wraparound covers for A4 landscape.
Six colour smoothing
The inks in the HP photo set are CMYK plus a light magenta and light cyan. This approach, which was originally pioneered for inkjet photo printers, gives a smoother appearance to the lighter tones, usually of 50% density or below. This gets around the visible limitations of halftone printing compared to true analogue silver halide prints. Full-strength cyan and magenta are the most likely to look grainy in the light tones, so lowering the contrast with the paler inks reduces the contrast and therefore graininess. This isn’t needed for yellow, which is always low contrast against white paper.
Using extra inks obviously costs more, as the job becomes six colour instead of four. Ordinary CMYK is pretty good from an Indigo, so many users use that to keep costs down. Photographic inkjet printers often also provide one or two strengths of ‘light black’ as well (ie grey inks), but these are primarily intended for smooth black and white photo prints, not colour. Some inkjets are now going over the top somewhat, with ten or 12 colour channels that incorporate ‘pure’ red, green and blue colours as well. This is intended to improve colour gamut as well as smoothing the highlights, but such a printer costs a fortune to refill.
Realistic gloss matching
In 2010 Kodak announced ‘Photo Solutions’ versions of its NexPress SX sheet fed toner press, currently available as the Photo 2700, 3300 and 3900 models. They are supplied with Creative Production Software (CPS) for consumer photography or Digital Print Production (DP2) software for integration workflow with professional labs, plus the VI Photo front end. These feature reformulated toners including algorithms that let the clear toner on the fifth unit smooth out the overall gloss level to look like a photo print. Alternatively a light black fifth toner can be used to smooth highlights and improve black and white work.
A Matte Fuser Roller reduces gloss if needed. The company also supplies Endura EP-D paper, made from photographic grade base material with the look and feel of lustre paper.
Konica Minolta, which used to be a major player in consumer film and minilabs before getting out of the market a few years ago, came up with a different approach for its dedicated production photo press. The bizhub Pro 65hc, announced at drupa 2008, uses specially developed ‘high chroma’ CMYK pigments that give a visibly better colour gamut than the standard toners of its other production presses. The company’s aim with the HC toners was to reproduce the appearance of an RGB monitor: in technical terms the toners’ gamut are close to the sRGB colour space gamut that’s widely used for monitors and consumer cameras, so less is lost in the conversion to the print space. Although the press was used for stunning demonstrations of digital colour at trade fairs, it only sold in small numbers – just three in the UK as far as we can tell. This seems to be because it could only be used for eye-scorching colour and couldn’t be wound down to reproduce ‘normal’ commercial print. It was too specialised for a market that was still emerging.
Despite the low sales KM persevered with the concept and late last year it launched the bizhub Press 70hc. This is a natural progression, as the 65hc was based on the older 6500/6501 print engine first seen at Ipex 2006, where the 70hc is based on the all-new 6000/7000 engine introduced at Ipex 2010. According to Pauline Brooks, KM’s product manager for production presses, the new 70hc colour management also lets it print ‘normal’ CMYK, so it can be used for general commercial print as well as brighter photographic work. This may well increase its appeal to a wider market.
All the other digital production press suppliers support the photo market to some extent, although it’s clear that in the UK, HP Indigo and NexPress dominate sales into full time photo operations.
Canon, which has extensive interests in cameras, lenses and other photographic products, has sold into this market for a long time, though without special modifications or toners. It pitches its imagePress medium-level production presses and the imageRunner Advance light production models as suitable for photographic work, as well as the low cost C1+ printer. UK users tend to offer photo products in addition to commercial print rather than run them as the basis of full time photo services. In the UK Canon has cooperated with the photo products ordering software developer Taopix for some years (as have other press suppliers such as HP and KM). This was formalised early this year with a pan-European distribution agreement.
Last year Canon in Japan announced the Dreamlabo 5000 (just called DL5000 in Europe), a narrow format inkjet press that’s dedicated to photo book and cut print work. The company is planning to offer it in Europe, though through a different channel to the production print systems such as imagePresses. There’s currently a test unit in one of Canon’s German sites that’s being shown to prospective users.
Xerox, with its wide range of digital presses from entry level 550 to high production iGen4, is quite widely used for photographic applications. Like Canon it has no special toners or other modifications, but it does sell photo software for front ends. The ability of the iGen4 EXP to print 660 mm long sheets could be useful for landscape books and covers.
Xeikon doesn’t seem to have a significant take-up in the photo products market despite its early presence at Photokina 1998. The company did show a complete photo book line with software ordering through to inline finishing at drupa 2008. The web feed and unlimited cutoff means the presses are often used for landscape work such as property brochures, so they’re certainly suitable for photo books.
Fujifilm, which like Kodak and Canon has extensive interests in the wider photography market, is pitching its new Jet Press 720 B2 format sheet fed inkjet press at the photo products market. The inks have a significantly wider gamut than standard offset or digital press toners, as evident from sample prints Digital Printer has seen. The press (see last month’s Digital Printer Centrefold) is expensive at around £1.2 million, and single sided (though suitable for work and turn). The B2 sheet format lets it handle larger formats than most digital presses, as well as wraparound covers for landscape format A4 photo books.
However, with HP’s forthcoming Indigo 10000 priced only a little higher and offering faster speeds and auto-duplexing, Fujifilm is facing a tough sales challenge. Conventional SRA3 presses can’t manage landscape A4 wraparounds, so photo book producers often use a low cost inkjet for this sort of work. However, the latest long sheet digital presses (Kodak NexPress SX, Xerox iGen4 EXP) can handle sheet lengths of around 660 mm, which would allow A4 portrait covers to be printed two-up. These are high end models of course. MGI’s Meteor DP60 Pro and the new Meteor DP 8700XL have a much lower installation cost and offer sheet sizes up to 330 x 650 mm as standard, but can optionally be configured to very long sheets up to 330 x 1020 mm.
Customer facing software
As we noted a year ago, the market for online ordering photo products software is dominated by just two companies, Taopix and DigiLabs. This is still the case, though both have been working on upgrades to their products. Taopix offers printers a product that’s virtually ready to use: they can add their own brand identity and develop product templates, but the user interface that the customer sees is always the same. Customers go to the printer’s website and download the design software to their own computers (Windows and OS X are offered). This lets them work offline to add their images adjust layouts and save and return to projects as much as they want before placing an order, paying for it and uploading the job to the printer. The software is locked in to the original printer, so jobs can only be sent there.
Social media linking
The original Taopix Photobook software is in the process of being replaced by the heavily revised Portfolio. This adds links to social media, so end user customers can download images from their collections on FaceBook or Flickr, or upload ‘page turning’ preview versions of their books to show to their online friends. A new library link allows access to stock photography, while offline ordering allows work to be saved to a CD or memory stick for posting or over-the-counter ordering.
Under the skin Portfolio has new automatic image enhancement and a new vector text engine with more advanced layout features.
Instead of the single package of the original Photobook, which cost about £20,000, Portfolio is now offered in three levels. Solo is for printers that just want to offer their own brand, and not to set up brands for customers too. The starting price is £11,756, a considerable saving. Pro allows multiple brands to be set up and costs from £21,875. Enterprise is for large operations with multiple presses and possibly multiple sites, costing from £30,625. Backing the customer-end design software is an e-commerce platform and production and dispatch software at the printer end.
Konica Minolta supplies a slightly stripped-down version of Taopix in Europe. Canon has just become a distributor of the standard version throughout Europe. Canon and HP have also often used Taopix as part of open days and exhibition demos designed to whip up interest in the subject.
The main alternative to Taopix in the UK is DigiLabs MyPhotoCreator, distributed by Workflowz. As with Taopix, there is a client application that end users can download and use to put together their book, calendar or whatever. The client is free to distribute, and the PSP only pays DigiLabs when an order is placed. The DigiLabs Lite solution starts at around £8000 for a limited number of users, intended to allow newcomers to get established. As they expand the system the cost goes up so that the average investment in the system is £20,000. DigiLabs also has a kiosk version available for retail environments.
New features will be added at drupa: support for masks within the templates, support for vignettes and support for CMYK images. The software already supports the fifth colour on a Kodak NexPress for watermarks and special effects with the raised Dimensional inks.
Some digital press makers offer software as part of photo packages, though a lot of this tends to be Taopix in some form.
However Kodak and Xerox do sell something different. Xerox uses photo editing software developed by the Spanish developer Imaxel.
Last year Kodak announced a new software suite for photo ordering to complement its Photo Solutions NexPresses. It will be introducing this to Europe at drupa, followed by the photographic industry show Photokina in Cologne in September. Create@home is customer facing ordering software, while there will also be a ‘white label’ facility for print service providers to offer to business customers, plus a module for press management.
