HP inkjet web press online at O'Neil

THE FUTURE OF PRINTING presses is humming softly, bathed in purple light and waiting for the start button to be pushed. As it is, and the paper moves through the press, the sound level does not rise greatly.

Admittedly there is no folder, the key source of noise in a standard web press, but there are few moving parts at all, only the unwind and wind units and a number of tensioning bars through the press. There are no plate cylinders, no inking chain, no dampeners; for this is an inkjet web press – the HP high-speed inkjet press.

This is the machine that drew so much attention at Drupa, where its important parts were cloaked in covers and what seemed like miles of pipework emanated from its rear. “We might have sold hundreds at Drupa,” says Aurelio Maruggi, head of HP Inkjet High-Speed Production Solutions (IHPS), the division set up to bring the project to reality. “But we wanted to ensure that each would be a success. Every customer installation has been thought about in terms of the end-to-end solution. We need each one to become a reference for its market area.”

At Drupa, sales were announced to Taylor Corporation, O’Neil Data Systems and CPI. The European book printer will take delivery of its machine in September at a plant in France. The machine that is going through its paces in front of HP executives, selected prospects and print buyers is at O’Neil Data in Santa Monica, close to Los Angeles.

This press was delivered at the turn of the year and remains a beta machine with HP’s engineers allowed access to it for an agreed number of hours a week. The rest of the time it prints for O’Neil’s customers, including, on the occasion of the open days, personalised versions of the Investor’s Business Daily, the newspaper it publishes.

“This copy personalised for Gareth Ward,” the copy slipped under the hotel door along with USA Today declared. That several of the stories inside had also been chosen to reflect personal prejudices (printing and publishing) was not evident on first sight.

Along with books, where the industry is close to the digital tipping point, according to Maruggi, newspapers are seen as a key area. “We are working to develop some of the underlying technology that will enable digital printing to become a better fit and to understand what is the best and fastest way to deliver,” he says. The wider 36in web, which has been previewed, and the 42in web, which is speculated about, will offer more options to publishers. But this is the future.

At O’Neil, the first commercial job was to produce the O’Neil Directory, a hefty tome of financial data taken directly from the company’s huge database. For the first time, the publisher was able to add highlight colour to the bewildering charts of share movements and purchasing patterns. It also shaved considerable time from the days it was printed on the Goss Urbanite in the building across the yard. Compared with the inkjet press, the old litho web is black and seems insect-like and cumbersome.

In contrast, the HP press is sleek and modern. Its two print units are separated by an oven to dry the web before it goes on for printing by the second unit, where a second oven dries that side before the rewind. The web coming from the unwind passes over the top of the first printing unit, drops down the side and then rolls over a humped printing section where a bonding agent, black, cyan, magenta and yellow inks are in turn laid down by double arrays of thermal inkjet heads. The web is turned under the press to head to the oven and a repeat of the web path for the second printing section.

Each print unit has a touch-screen control panel which is the only interface to the press. This displays press performance, showing how full the digital page buffer storage is, the speed of the press, temperatures, ink consumption and so on. When there is a problem, the cause is displayed and an operator intervenes to remove an inkjet head, replace the reel or whatever else is required. Compared to the continual adjustment needed on an offset press, this machine runs itself and operators have become its custodians rather than printers.

At each reel change (after about 90 minutes’ operation at 1,000 feet a minute, depending on stock) the print heads undergo a cleaning process to help keep the 11,000 nozzles on each head clear. Two rows of seven print heads comprise each colour, providing considerable redundancy in operation. When too many nozzles fail, the head is replaced by unclipping it and dropping in a replacement. No tools are required. Heads seem to last several weeks.

Behind the press is the pumping system and the 200 litre barrels of ink sitting on a spotless bund. As each litre of ink costs something like $40, the cleanliness is understandable. The company is reckoning to get through one barrel a week at current levels of consumption, though coverage levels will have a significant impact on usage.

The ovens are ir dryers, lifting the temperature of the web enough to evaporate the water content in the ink. Currently there is no remoist unit, which may become necessary if the press is to be used for work like magazines or catalogues with high colour content on coated paper, as HP clearly hopes. Currently uncoated papers from 40-200gsm are used, but thanks to the bonding system, these can be standard offset grades.

There was much discussion about the personalised newspaper and whether there was a quality difference between offset and inkjet. The most obvious difference, one that could be seen from several feet away on the bedroom floor, was that the dryers on the inkjet press had caused the paper to ruck up compared to the smooth finish of the conventionally printed paper.

O’Neil will not have this problem for a while. As well as the directory and other book products, the mainstay of work on the press has been mailings for customers of Humana, one of the largest health insurance businesses in the US. Each customer receives a welcome pack, personalised to the areas that they have chosen to sign up to and with images selected to reflect the life stage the customer has reached.

It is a data heavy job, calling on HP Exstream applications to manipulate the material and create the PDFs that the Rips accept. At O’Neil there are 144 Rips arranged on Blade servers. These Rip the PDFs into Indigo’s compressed image formats and deliver these to the press through a dedicated fibre link that has a 1Gb/sec capacity. The processed pages are held in buffer storage so that the press never runs dry of data and continues to print at its optimum engine speed.

Post press, HP has been working with Timsons to create a means of producing a folded and fused book block; with Muller Martini to go a stage further, creating a link to the Sigmaline online book production system; with CNC and Pitney Bowes on mailer inserters; and with MBO to produce folded sections from the reel after slitting on a Ehret unit. Then there is a multiplicity of ways of working with Hunkeler as the world’s leading company in paper processing technology.

HP is to release the bonding chemistry that the technology uses to enable the ink to hold fast to the paper. Paper mills will be able to produce reels that have the bonding coat pre-applied. HP has also developed a coated paper with the bonding coat in place, but this precious substrate is going to remain an HP-branded material. With a pre-coated material running through the press, it opens the way to print with more than four colours. Currently there is space for six printing units, the second being left free to allow a fraction of drying time for the bonding coat. Six colours plus printing to coated paper suggests that HP is not going to be limited to books, newspapers and transpromo when thinking about the potential for this press. What is at O’Neil is the first member of a much wider family of products.

Scott Schiller, director of marketing business development at HP IHPS, says that the press design is very much about modular thinking. “One of the things that we think is a very powerful idea is that instead of a number of digital boxes that are thrown away every five years, we have a platform; and while the paper width doesn’t change, the inkjet technology can be updated to deliver more speed so that the printer doesn’t have to reinvest in an entire press.

“We have done the market research, which maps out current printing applications and pages, and looks at the opportunity space application by application and when the transformation to digital is appropriate. In some sectors digital will not be appropriate, but in others the vast majority of work will be printed digitally.

“This is a transformational play which will fundamentally change production processes.”


Customers so far
Within the next 24 months HP will be into double figures with worldwide installations of the high-speed web press, says Scott Schiller. Apart from O’Neil Data Systems, the installations announced to date are:

COURIER CORPORATION
Courier is one of the largest book printers in North America, printing 175 million books a year. It will install the press late this year as a central part of its print on demand strategy. Steve van Freschel says: “The book publishers want to reduce their working capital inventories and eliminate waste and with a web offset platform we cannot deliver that. This is about giving the short run lengths publishers require.”

CPI
CPI is Europe’s largest book printer and the leading user of Timson web offset presses. It will install the HP press in France where it will concentrate on printing books with runs from 300-3,000 copies, hitting a segment of the market (runs of 1,000-3,000 books) that is growing by 8% a year. It will be fitted with Timson equipment to produce book blocks for offline binding. Should this prove a success, CPI will expect to build its future production requirements around the HP press.

CONSOLIDATED GRAPHICS
The company has been created via an acquisition programme that has brought together 70 operations across the US and more recently into Eastern Europe. It used its muscle when buying 36 HP Indigos at Drupa and is to add the HP web in the summer, making it the second user for the press. Jeff Huber says: “We have seen digital printing grow from 60 digital presses to around 200 across the group in the last couple of years. This is something we are seeing as a big step for us and will be taking us in a new direction.”

TAYLOR CORPORATION
Taylor Corporation is a diversified US print business with operations across North America offering commercial, promotional and functional print. It has experience in highly sophisticated personalisation for marketing and fulfilment purposes. This diversity means that a number of applications are suitable for the press