A striking theme at drupa is the number of offset press makers that will be making significant announcements of all-digital presses, or alliances with existing digital manufacturers. Simon Eccles takes a look.
That offset press makers are interested in digital technologies isn’t a surprise: most of them have already dipped in and out of the fledgling market over the past couple of decades. However, first time around they mostly offered digitally imaged on-press plate imagers rather than ‘true’ digital devices, which we can loosely define as being able to vary every printed image. However, with one of two exceptions they all got out of DI presses in the 2000s.
Whether they are now acting out of experience or desperation will only be apparent from their sales figures in years to come. Hopefully it is the former, because these manufacturers have vast knowledge about how to build innovative, tough, long lived machinery and how to achieve the highest print quality. They can also capitalise on their existing engineering knowledge to build the media transports.
Heidelberg already announced its re-entry into digital a year ago with its partnership with Ricoh: so far this seems to be paying off. The company has announced that its current and future digital presses will have the family name Linoprint: the Linoprint C (for commercial) models will be the Ricoh presses, while the Linoprint L (for labels) will be narrow web inkjet models arising from Heidelberg’s purchase of the small German manufacturer CSAT last year.
Sales of the Ricoh Pro C901 and C751 through the Heidelberg channels have been respectable (around 60 worldwide by late February despite sales initially being restricted to Germany and the UK). Now these presses are being integrated into Heidelberg’s own Prinect production network, which combines pre-press and MIS/admin systems via JDF. Heidelberg’s CEO Bernhard Schreier told Digital Printer that the next stage, joint product development, is already in its early stages, with both companies’ engineers swapping ideas in Japan.
From 1993 and for about the next ten years Heidelberg was the world’s most successful supplier of DI presses with on-press offset plate imagers. The definitive model was the Quickmaster 4-DI, an SRA3 portrait format small offset press that sold in large numbers – about 3000 worldwide. This used Presstek imagers and plastic waterless plates. It was replaced by the current Anicolor Speedmasters, which have a clever keyless inking system for fast makeready but use conventional wet offset plates imaged off-press.
There was also a B2 wet offset metal plate model, the Speedmaster 74DI, with very unusual Creo sourced thermal imaging heads that lifted out of the way after use, to allow space for normal dampening roller trains. This sold in fairly limited numbers, mostly in CD carton press configurations, with most models apparently ending up running conventional off-press imaged plates.
Despite Kodak’s woes, Mr Schreier has ruled out any prospect of buying back into Nexpress, the high end toner press operation it originally set up as a joint venture with Kodak. In 2005 Heidelberg pulled out, selling its share for a reported $5. The reasons at the time were never explained, but at a pre-drupa press conference in late February, Mr Schreier said that it was because the Nexpress design was too high end, with no prospect of being shrunk down to smaller volume designs. The Ricoh presses by contrast, he said, have a price and volume point that fits below the B3 Anicolor Speedmaster presses, so they are suited to runs that are too short for offset. The company is marketing the Ricoh machines as being able to match the quality of the Anicolor presses on the same stocks while running on Prinect networks, but isn’t saying much about the variable data capabilities of true digital.
This might be seen as an attempt to preserve a reason to keep buying offset Heidelbergs, but it is certainly true that haven’t been any proper low end Nexpresses. Instead Kodak attempted to fill a perceived gap in its line up by reselling the Canon imagePress 7000 as the entry level NexPress M700, but this had virtually nothing in common with ‘real’ Nexpresses apart from the front end. It is no longer listed on the company website.
New for drupa
KBA, the offset and gravure press maker, will show RotaJet 76, an inkjet web press at drupa. It has Kyocera piezo printheads running water based pigment inks and takes webs up to 780 mm wide. It can print 4/4 colours at up to 150 metres per minute. The native resolution is 600 dpi, but variable droplet size improves the apparent resolution. The heads are described as heavy duty with high reliability, low failure and little regular maintenance requirement. KBA also stresses that its precision web tension contributes to the print and register quality. The unwinder and infeed unit have been designed specifically for the RotaJet and there is ‘an ingeniously simple web lead without turning bars’, contributing to low start up waste. A dispersion coater is planned as a future option for further quality enhancement.
The two arrays of 56 inkjet heads each (total 112) form an arch over large central impression cylinders for four colour printing on both sides of the web. The heads retract sideways for cleaning and maintenance purposes. The front end is based on the Adobe PDF Print Engine (APPE) and can deliver full colour variable data at the maximum web speed.
The RotaJet 76 on display at drupa will be operating in conjunction with a SigmaLine digital production system from Müller Martini. This will be configured with a SigmaFolder variable format section folder module and a Primera Digital saddle stitcher system, enabling digitally printed magazines and advertising brochures to be folded and stitched inline.
RotaJet is the first result of an alliance with RR Donnelley, which the companies announced last year. Back in 2007 Donnelley revealed the forthcoming ProteusJet inkjet press, whose development it had commissioned itself. This had thermal inkjet heads. The Kyocera heads in the RotaJet are piezo types. KBA stresses that it is building this press itself, in Würzburg.
Another RR Donnelley digital project is the Apollo on-press system that sprays an ink-repellant fluid onto offset plates, creating a semi-variable image area. Very little information has been released on this and it’s unclear whether it still exists or whether it is part of the KBA alliance (neither party is saying very much until drupa opens).
Again, KBA is no stranger to digital: it was a partner with Scitex in the Karat 74 B2 format digitally imaged offset press project launched in 1997, eventually taking it over completely and selling the presses in respectable numbers for around ten years. Karat 74 saw the first implementation of the company’s clever Gravuflow keyless inking system, which is still available on conventionally imaged models such as the waterless Genius 52. For several years KBA also resold the Ryobi/Presstek SRA3 press currently known as the Presstek 34DI, which it called the Karat 46.
Another interesting development to be shown at drupa is a KBA 105 conventional offset press fitted with twin Atlantic Zeiser Delta 105iUV inkjet heads for personalisation. Up to eight heads can be fitted in production systems. A new AirTronic vacuum cylinder steadies the sheets as they pass beneath the heads, so there’s no need for extra mechanical guides. UV inks are used, with LED curing lamps.
Surprise entrant?
Komori is something of a surprise entrant into the digital arena, though it did dip a toe in the area back in 2000 with the Lithrone S40D, the world’s first and so far only B1 format digitally imaged offset press, with Scitex on-press plate imaging units. Only two seem to have been installed.
The new deal, to resell the SRA3 format Konica Minolta bizhub Press C8000 sheet ed toner press, is basically the same as Heidelberg is doing with Ricoh. The front end will be integrated into Komori’s own colour management system, allowing what the company predicts will be a precise match between offset and digital results. Identical digital and offset jobs will be shown side by side at drupa. A trial machine is already running at the company’s European showroom in Holland.
At drupa, the company will also show two inkjet prototypes, sheetfed and web fed, based on new Konica Minolta 1200 dpi inkjet heads on Komori paper transport chassis and using the company’s knowledge of integration with inline finishing for webs. Very little information about these is being released prior to drupa, though we do have some basic specification from which certain predictions can be made.
The web press has a 52 cm width and a maximum speed of 150 metres per minute. So far we don’t know if it will be simplex or duplex, but at drupa it will run inline with a variable cut off sheeter.
The sheetfed ‘concept’ press is 74 cm wide. Although originally it was thought that this might take B1 sheets in portrait orientation, Neil Wrigglesworth, general manager of the Komori Graphic Technology Centre, told Digital Printer that it is a B2 format press with a landscape configuration, the same as the B2 Fujifilm Jet Press 720. It will print at 3300 sheets per hour: again we don’t yet know if it’s simplex or duplex.
In an offset press, landscape configurations are used because this maximises the benefit of the rolling power, ie the amount of ink that the rolling train can transfer onto the plate. This isn’t a factor with inkjets, so in theory a 74 cm wide press could be a portrait format and take B1 sheets. Fujifilm mounts its sheets on a drum to control their alignment precisely as they rotate under the printheads, so it is possible that Komori is doing something similar.
Going hybrid
There is a brief announcement of a new ‘hybrid inkjet system’ from manroland sheet fed at drupa, which will be integrated with an offset press to provide personalisation. Presumably this will be inkjet heads positioned close to the delivery: manroland already has experience of this in the past, with Kodak Versamark heads. At the end of 2010 the company announced a sales alliance with Océ, but nothing concrete has so far seemed to come of it. The partnership has survived the recent break up of manroland, but this has presumably distracted the parties from doing much lately. The two companies have long formed the offset and digital elements within the multi-vendor PrintCity alliance at drupa and Ipex, and will do so again this year, but they haven’t said anything lately to indicate any closer involvement.
In previous years, MAN Roland (as it used to be called) resold Xeikon digital web toner presses as the Dicopress series until 2002. It also developed DIcoweb, a spectacular full size digitally imaged web offset press with re-imagable stainless steel sleeve cylinders. It showed it at drupa 2000 and Ipex 2002, but only made a handful of test installations.
Presstek invented the original concept of on-press digitally imaged plates and licensed its technology to a lot of press makers during the 1990s. However they all pulled out again in the early 2000s, leaving it as pretty well the sole supplier, commissioning Ricoh to build presses with successive generations of Presstek thermal imaging heads. .
Its current line up of digitally imaged presses is the 34DI portrait format SRA3 format press; the 52DI landscape format B3 press, and the 74 DI multi-unit B2 press. All use Presstek’s own plastic plate material and imagers, with the main press hardware built by Ryobi.
The 75DI was memorably demonstrated at Ipex in 2010, though only a handful has been installed worldwide since. At drupa there will be a five colour configuration with an inline aqueous coater. New at the show will be a quality control and inspection system that reads the colour bars and adjusts colour on the fly, while also checking each sheet for defects such as hickeys, marking, scumming or scratching.
Smaller DI presses have tended to use central impression cylinders or two-unit double-plate configurations, which kept them compact but limited the number of colours and prevented perfecting. The 75DI’s conventional units allow any number of colours and long perfector configurations, but having in effect a separate platesetter on each unit makes them expensive compared to conventional B2 presses with off-press imagers.
How the costing works out will depend on the proportion of short run jobs. According to Presstek, the 75DI ‘is a complementary technology to both conventional offset and digital toner based printing, sitting squarely in the middle of the two. It handles the longer runs that are simply too expensive to produce with toner, yet are too short to cost effectively produce using conventional offset-in the 500 to 20,000 sheet range.’
Performance similarities
It is striking that a lot of the new entrants into inkjets are producing systems of roughly equivalent format and performance. The majority of web presses are 52 or 76 cm wide models, many of them running at 150 metres per minute at 600 or 1200 dpi (with tweaks up or down based on resolution); while sheetfed inkjets are coming in as B2 and approximately 3000 sheets per hour. That the formats are the same isn’t surprising, as they suit established practices in the printing industry. The similarity of performance is more interesting because they use quite a wide variety of inkjet head types and technologies. As time goes by we would expect to see a broader spread of capabilities, and prices.
An inkjet press is basically a marriage of a mechanical paper transport with an inkjet printing unit. So far this hasn’t seemed to do anything to bring inkjet prices down: they all cost more than an equivalent format offset press, despite the inkjet components being more or less solid state (ink feeds apart), compared with the mechanically complex offset print units with their cylinders, rollers trains, motors, precision gearing, high stress side-frames etc.
Manufacturers will tell you that high reliability inkjet heads are jolly expensive and the research and development costs a fortune. If so, hopefully inkjet press prices will fall radically over then next decade.
