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Drupa 2008 will be the fourth drupa eventin which digital printing has been one ofthe major technologies shown. From onedrupa to the next, we have seen signifi-

cant developments that move forward both the state-of-the-art of digital printing and customers’ percep-tions of what digital printing can do for them. Atdrupa 1995, despite the tremendous innovations ofboth Indigo and Xeikon, digital printing for mostprinters was not a relevant technology and fewprinters took it seriously. In fact, they took the con-cept of DI (direct imaging) printing with on-the-pressCTP far more seriously at that time.

At drupa 2000, the arrival of the Xerox Docucolor2000 series changed the perception of digital printingin the eyes of many printers and really started themove of digital printing into many offset houses. Atdrupa 2004 printers’ concerns about quality werelargely dissipated with the quality being shown fromHP Indigo, Kodak Nexpress and Xerox iGen3. Océ alsoindicated its way to the future with its Variostream9210 monochrome printer as its future platform togrow into a four-color continuous feed printer.

In the inkjet area, the speed of the Kodak Ver-samark indicated likely developments for the future.Agfa’s Dotrix continuous feed inkjet printer showedthe opportunity of moving inkjet into the flexo mar-kets previously not covered by digital printing andalso showed how UV curable inks could open upnew opportunities for inkjet printing.

Perhaps the most interesting product at drupa2004 that showed how the technology could changethe future market was the Riso HC5000 inkjetprinter. This amazing product was the fastestsheetfed color digital printer at the show as well asbeing one of the cheapest.

It has already been said that drupa 2008 will be the“inkjet drupa.” Up to now inkjet printing has had amajor impact in the wide- and superwide-formatareas, taking work predominantly from screen-printing. In this market companies like VUTEk, HPScitex, Nur, Inca and many others have changed theface of display, poster, billboard and point-of-saleprinting. In this we have seen a whole new range ofprinted products that previously were not available,such as building and bus wraps. This form of digitalprinting using inkjet has largely taken over in themarkets in which it is used.

There will still be more developments of this atdrupa with faster and higher quality printers, but wealso will see major ecological pressures in this areaas aqueous, UV curable and other eco-friendly inkstake a share of the market from solvent inks. We canalso expect further developments of this technologyinto the packaging area with equipment for printedcorrugated and folding cartons at, or close to, themanufacturing locations for the products they are topackage. The key developments, however, at drupa2008 will be in the up to 50 cm wide digital presseswhere the battle will be between inkjet and xero-

Hybrid & DigitalEvolution of Printing MachinesWill drupa 2008 be the inkjet drupa? The mainmessage is that inkjet has arrived as a technology for opening up new applications for digital printing,particularly in the industrial printing area.

BY ANDREW TRIBUTE

D R U P A

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graphic technologies. (I include HP Indigo’s presses inthe xerographic area as their “Electrophotography”technology is a form of xerography and their Elec-troink is liquid toner.)

In the sheetfed digital printing area that will pre-dominantly stay xerographic, we will get digitalpresses going a little faster than today. I would, how-ever, be surprised if any sheetfed color printerexceeds a speed of 150 A4 pages per minute. In thismarket the battle is much more about quality thanspeed; and having more than four colors may proveto be a key selling message providing it does notimpact too much on speed. Somewhat surprisingly,I don’t expect to see a 50 cm wide sheetfed digitalcolor press. The key battles in this area will be inquality and cost. In the cost area, we will see evenmore aggressive competition in the sub €50,000market. Here the speed level for this price should get

up to 70 A4 pages per minute or more. I also expectto see HP introduce its Edgeline inkjet technologyinto this area. I would also not be surprised to see ahigher quality version of the Riso inkjet than the cur-rent HC5500 model.

The main area for inkjet technology, however, willbe in the continuous feed color presses. At the lastdrupa we only had three products in this area—theKodak Versamark, the Miyakoshi and the Agfa Dotrix.This drupa there will be many more. We already havethe Dainippon Screen Truepress Jet 520 and the IBMInfoprint 5000 that uses the same print engine as theTruepress Jet520. These use Seiko Epson printheadsand aqueous inks and a single engine will producearound 450 A4 color pages a minute.

The reason we are now starting to see high-speedinkjet printers is due to ongoing developments inprinthead technology that allow printer manufac-

Drupa 2008 will be the fourth drupa event inwhich digital printing has been one of themajor technologies shown. From one drupa tothe next, there have been significantdevelopments that move forward the state-of-the-art of digital printing and customers’perceptions of what digital printing can do forthem. At drupa 1995, digital printing for mostprinters was not a relevant technology andfew printers took it seriously. At drupa 2000the arrival of the Xerox Docucolor 2000 serieschanged the perception of digital printing inthe eyes of many printers. At drupa 2004printers concerns about quality were largelydissipated with the quality being shown fromsome of the major vendors.

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D R U P A

turers to create full machine width print arrays thatallow for the ink to be laid down in one pass of thepaper under the head. In most wide-format anddesktop inkjet printers, the printhead has to makemultiple passes over the paper to lay down the ink.At the recent LabelExpo exhibition in Brussels in Sep-tember 2007, there were a number of new inkjetpresses that show how future inkjet presses may look.One of these is the Nilpeter Caslon press co-devel-oped with FFEI. In the Illustration above, Caslon’sfour-color inkjet printing system shows some of thecharacteristics of a single-pass inkjet print engine.

In this, the web substrate is moved from left toright over the curved print platen under the fourprint assemblies. Each assembly in the case of this33 cm wide printer has five Xaar 1001 printheads thatare physically and optically aligned (stitched) to givea full 33 cm wide print array with a resolution of 360dpi with 8 gray levels. The web speed at this resolu-tion is 25 meters per minute. It can run at up to 50meters per minute with four gray levels, which givea lower quality image. In terms of A4 images, 25meters per minute is the equivalent of 115 A4 imagesper minute. The ink in this print engine is UV cur-able ink and the curing takes place between eachcolor and after all the colors have been printed. UVcurable ink allows inkjet printing on a wide range ofsubstrates and also is ecologically friendly.

Currently, the Caslon print engine is offered withimaging widths of 33 and 42 cm. In the latter case, theprint array has seven printheads stitched together.Later there are plans to produce Caslon print enginesusing an array of eight stitched printheads per color.All of these would have the same imaging speed ofmoving the web at 25 meters per minute, however, interms of A4 pages per minute this would increase tothe speed to around 160 A4 pages per minute.

The speed of inkjet printers is, therefore, basedupon the linear imaging speed of the printhead. Thespeed of the head is based upon the technology

used. Currently the fastest printheads are the con-tinuous inkjet technology heads used in the KodakVersamark V-Series product range. These heads, how-ever, do not produce as good a quality as drop ondemand (DOD) piezo printheads. In the piezo DODarea there are a number of different printheadapproaches and this affects the quality of printedimage and speed of operation of these heads.

The fastest DOD heads are the Seiko Epson andPanasonic heads but these only produce a binary (1gray level) 600 dpi ink dot. The heads also use a piezothin film actuator technology that limits the printerto using aqueous inks. This also limits the type ofsubstrates that can be used. Most DOD printheadsused with solvent inks for the superwide-formatprinters and for the presses using UV curable inksuse a shear mode technology that allows either abinary (1 bit) or a variable drop size (multiple over-lapping drops), but don’t run as fast as the thin filmheads. The basics from this is that of the new inkjetpresses that will be seen at drupa they will eitherhave a linear imaging speed of around 25 meters perminute with excellent quality or speeds in excess of50 meters per minute with lower quality and limita-tions on substrates that can be used.

These new inkjet print engines will be available inmost cases as standalone printers in either single ordual engine mode that allows for single-pass duplexprinting. There will, however, be the start of themarket for hybrid systems where the inkjet printengine will be added to an existing press or finishingsystem. We saw the first such product at IPEX in 2006when Muller Martini and Kodak worked together toadd Versamark printheads onto a Muller Martinioffset press. In this situation the offset press wouldprint the static data and the inkjet engine would addthe changeable data. The Agfa Dotrix print enginehad also been used to create a hybrid press when it

Structure of a single-pass inkjet print engine

VX5000E - Kodak Versamark press

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was added to a Mark Andy label press. This projectnever succeeded and was dropped. At LabelExpoNilpeter introduced a hybrid label press by addingthe Caslon inkjet print engine to a Nilpeter label press.The development of inkjet print engines such asCaslon with its range of imaging widths is likely tostart up a new market in hybrid presses when addedto existing presses or even to print finishing systems.

In terms of new inkjet presses that I expect to seeat drupa almost all of these will use DOD ratherthan continuous inkjet technology. Kodak has a newdevelopment under way called “Stream” that isexpected to move continuous inkjet to a new levelof quality, flexibility and speed. This is likely to bepreviewed at drupa but I don’t expect to see a high-speed color press product probably until 2010. Inthe DOD area the fastest product will probably berunning at a speed in excess of 1,000 A4 pages perminute in simplex mode. This is the same speed asthe fastest Kodak Versamark at present. The qualityof such a press, however, will be higher than that ofthe Versamark.

In the DOD inkjet area, there is another tech-nology called thermal inkjet and this is the tech-nology used by Canon, HP and Lexmark. This is acheaper technology than piezo DOD inkjet but it isnot as flexible. The technology of thermal inkjet isfor the ink to be heated and as it boils it is expelledfrom the printhead. This technology can only useaqueous inks. The technology allows for high reso-lutions and the latest printheads allow for a largenumber of nozzles in the head. Unlike piezo basedDOD printers the printheads have a limited lifespanand need regular replacement.

For the printer market, the new HP Edgeline print-heads are likely to have a major impact on the officeand possibly graphic arts markets. The first productsusing these heads are a 6-color photo printer withthree printheads and a 4-color printer with fourprintheads with a speed around 60 A4 pages perminute. Potentially, HP can build a range of productsusing Edgeline printheads and these could be of awide-format for display printing or be built into wideprint array for either sheet and continuous feedprinters. I would expect to see some HP Edgelinedevelopments at drupa.

From the above outline of developments inprinters one might imagine that there are only futuredevelopments using inkjet technology. This, however,is not the case and there will be a large number of

new products using xerographic based technology.At present in the “light” color market of productsrunning up to 70 A4 pages per minute this is cur-rently an almost 100 percent xerographic market.Only HP and Riso have inkjet products in this area.This is the area of the market that in the past twoyears has exploded with huge sales. It is where theentry-level products for digital printing will be foundfor printers still to enter the digital market. This areaof the market is very competitive with products fromXerox, Ricoh, Konica Minolta, Canon and HP. Wecan expect a range of new products in this area thatoffer higher speeds, greater functionality and betterquality. With the exception of HP, and possibly Riso,this will remain predominantly a xerographic area.

In the production color area, again I believe thiswill remain a xerographic area. In the speed area of70-200 A4 pages per minute where offset equivalentquality is the primary requirement, xerography willcontinue to produce a higher quality than inkjetprinting. I would expect that in the sheetfed area thefastest products will be approaching 150 A4 pagesper minute. In the offset quality continuous feedmarket, I expect to see products approaching 200pages per minute. These engines are not imaging anyfaster than the sheetfed engines; in fact, they areslower but use two print engines printing both sidesof the web concurrently. Also, the engines fromXeikon and Océ print a 50 cm wide web so they canprint more pages across the web. It still surprises methat there is no 50 cm wide sheetfed color printerand I don’t expect to see one at drupa.

There will, however, be a faster xerographic printerat drupa, but this will be printing what is beingreferred to as business color. I expect the highlight ofthe Xerox stand to be their new continuous feed colorpress, the 490/980. This produces a quality that is sim-ilar to that of the high-speed DOD inkjet printers andis suited for transactional, direct mail and newspaperapplications. This product sets a new price level for

Xerox 400/90 Business Color Press

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xerographic printing, however, at a speedapproaching 1,000 A4 pages per minute and at alower print cost than other xerographic color printers.This will challenge the new high-speed inkjet printersin opening up new markets for digital printing.

So will drupa 2008 be the inkjet drupa? Well theanswer to that is both yes and no. In terms of yes, itwill be the arrival of a large number of new inkjetprinting solutions that will develop and expand theirrole in the market over the next few years.

They will not, however, at this time challenge theexistence of offset or flexo printing as some haveclaimed. As yet, the printheads are not good enoughin terms of quality or speed to challenge conven-

tional printing. In the quality area, inkjet as yet willnot be competing against xerographic approachesfor offset and better than offset quality applications.It will expand its role in the wide- and superwide-format applications area and will open new marketsfor on-demand packaging applications.

In the new area of high-speed transactional busi-ness color we will see inkjet and xerography com-peting against each other with similar performanceand quality. The main message of drupa will be thatinkjet will have arrived as a technology for openingup many new applications for digital printing, par-ticularly in the industrial printing area. Perhapsdrupa 2012 will be the real inkjet drupa.

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Soon all of Düsseldorf will bedecked out in the season’s color—drupa red. That’s because from May29-June 11 the metropolis on theRhine River will become drupacityand welcome hundreds of thou-sands of international guests.

Going to a trade show in Ger-many is a unique experience. Fol-lowing are several helpful tips forvisitors and exhibitors at drupa 2008for their stay in the city of Düssel-dorf and at the fairgrounds.

Getting to the fairgrounds: Publictransportation is recommended toget to the fairgrounds. From down-town Düsseldorf, Tram No. U78 goesto the North Entrance, Tram No. U79to the East Entrance and Bus No. 722serves the East and South Entrances.From the airport, Bus No. 896 con-nects to all fairgrounds entrances.Visitor, exhibitor and press entrancepasses to the show allow free use ofall public transportation with the

Rhine-Ruhr (VRR) and Rhein-Sieg(VRS) transportation network on alldays of the event.

Taxi fares are a basic flat rate plusa charge per kilometer; fares aregenerally higher than in the UnitedStates; round up tips to the next fullEuro amount (maximum 10 per-cent). Taxis must be boarded at taxistands.

Rental cars are available fromAutohansa, Avia, Europa ServiceHertz, Sixt-Budget and others; officesare located at the airport, the maintrain station and several downtownlocations. On the main streets inDüsseldorf, Messe Düsseldorf signsshow the way to the fairgrounds.

At the show: Entrance passes andshow directories can be purchasedat www.drupa.com in advance of theshow or at the fairgrounds; the costis greater if purchased at the fair-grounds. Generally, visitors do notregister at German trade shows.

The KATI computerized catalogdisplay system makes it easy to findthe location of every exhibitor andproduct category; KATI terminals arelocated in every hall.

The exhibit halls are linked byprotected walkways, moving side-walks and shuttle buses. Located inthe middle of the fairgrounds is aService Center with a shoppingarcade, post office, bank, travel ser-vice and train reservation desks.

Important German signs at thefairgrounds and their English trans-lation are: Messe - Fairgrounds; Ein-gang - Entrance; Ausgang - Exit;Notausgang - Emergency Exit; andWC - Restroom.

Germany in general: Shops aregenerally open from 9:00 a.m. to 6:30p.m. Monday through Friday andfrom 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. on Sat-urday. Larger department stores areoften open until 8:00 p.m. on week-days and until 6:00 p.m. on Saturday.All stores are closed on Sunday.

Banks are generally open from9:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. and from 2:30p.m. to 4:00 p.m. (Thursdays until5:30 p.m.); the Euro is the single cur-rency for the European Nations,including Germany.

Asking for quick service in a non-fast-food restaurant is consideredrude; water does not accompany themeal but can be ordered by thebottle. With regard to tipping, a ser-vice charge is included in the bill (asmall tip should be handed to theserver directly).

A brochure about German busi-ness customs and practices can beordered from Messe DüsseldorfNorth America free of charge.

For further information, pleasecontact Messe Düsseldorf NorthAmerica; email info@mdna.com;visit the website at www.mdna.com;or phone 312-781-5180.

Helpful Tips for drupa 2008

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