Digital adoption tipped to pay off for printers

THERE IS NO HP INKJET web press in the UK as yet, nor a four-colour press using Kodak’s Stream (now Prosper) technology. But advanced high-speed digital presses are starting to sprout to chase direct mail, transpromo and book printing. There’s also the opportunity to print newspapers to consider, and word is that such considerations are being taken seriously.

The idea is that having digital print alongside powerful web offset presses will allow the plant to print small circulation weeklies, or to localise larger titles with digitally printed sections relevant to only a small audience; while the conventional presses produce the provincial evening papers or larger pagination products. There’s opportunity too to produce papers where the audience is widely spread, overseas titles or foreign language papers for example. The research has been done: the question is at what point it becomes economic to publish in this way.

That question is the nub of the matter for all providers of digital web presses and their prospective customers. These presses are not cheap and few print specifiers have been persuaded that the extra cost or effort is worthwhile. Nevertheless, even without the HP web and Prosper, there is a growing population of digital web presses. Screen has installed its Truepress Jet520 at GI Direct, the remarkably similar Ricoh InfoPrint 5000 is in place at Dsicmm and CMDS, Xerox has its 980 running at MBA, and Océ has its first JetStream at Polestar Direct. Real Digital did not wait for these to be available and instead built its own presses around what is now Agfa’s Dotrix technology. There is also a healthy population of mono presses and cut sheet digital machines that are producing this type of transpromo work, or which are used for book printing.

Xerox has been successful with its 1300 ‘Sedona’, with installations at MBA, Real Digital and book printer CPI Anthony Rowe. A CPI sister plant in France will be the European pilot installation for the HP web press, taking delivery of the press in September.

Should it work, and there are no reasons to suppose it will not, CPI is unlikely to be buying further offset presses. Another of the early adopters for the HP inkjet press is Courier Corporation, another US book printer. Others in North America are using Océ or Xerox webs while Screen also has customers producing books on its inkjet machines.

Finding the application is the key to success. DST Output has been producing credit card statements and adding targeted coupons on white paper reels using older Versamark technology. Ceo Tim Delahay continues to argue the benefits, and retaining several contracts including Orange recently suggests further developments in this area.

One of the converted customers is Tesco, whose Clubcard is a perfect opportunity for transpromo applications, as offers can be tailored to purchasing patterns and the supermarket can reward big-spending customers, while showing them how many points they have accumulated. It now wants to take the product to the next stage, making full use of the technology that is available. The incumbent producer is Polestar, where the investment in the new Océ JetStream 2200 inkjet web would seem perfectly timed for the contract.

Other retailers have similar loyalty schemes, but have not as yet followed Tesco’s path. This is the cautious approach, as marketers and purchasing departments do not seem to be convinced that the move is worth the money. Polestar ceo Barry Hibbert says there is a wide discrepancy between those companies that have grasped the idea and those that have not. “I find it astonishing that mail order companies, retail companies and even publishers with access to data are still way behind. There’s a huge difference between the market leaders and the rest.”

At GI Direct sales director Patrick Headley endorses this. The company was the first last year to install Screen’s Truepress Jet520 inkjet press. “It has been a slow burn,” he says, “although people are now talking about it. In theory it is a very compelling sales argument, but it does take people a bit of time to get their heads around it, especially when there’s an initial increase in costs. That said, it is the future and I wouldn’t change anything.”

While he says that quality of print is not an issue, there is definitely a question in that the technologies are not conducive to printing on coated papers. The lack of coated is a major stumbling block to adoption at least in the UK.

US commentators are apt to call the colour produced ‘business class’, to distinguish it perhaps from economy colour and to emphasis that the print has a job to do. What marketers are waiting for is for print to turn left and deliver first class colour. Uv inkjet can print on coated paper, as Real Digital has found. HP is working to develop a coated paper for its press and has been showing early samples. These are lightweight papers, more SC than LWC in appearance. But it is a step towards filling the gap.

Kodak is promising that the Prosper technology will print on coated papers. The manufacturer has yet to name a beta site for the colour version of the press. Development, however, is being accelerated and a decision about the first commercial machine is promised for the next few weeks. The mono heads that are in use at beta sites have proved their worth on coated papers.

This is not a problem for Xeikon, whose electrophotographic technology is not so reliant on a receptive paper. By comparison with the high-speed inkjets, the Xeikon is pedestrian, although it is the fastest press of its type. Chris Matthews, managing director of Xeikon supplier Punch Graphix UK, points out that not every job demands the monstrous print runs of which inkjet is capable. The company has a customer in Sweden producing the sort of loyalty card transpromo documents that Tesco has pioneered in the UK, and this set-up is producing millions of impressions a month.

“We are cheaper than putting in a full inkjet line,” he says. “And we have the quality that is only being promised by inkjet. We also have the IPDS front end and have proved that it works.”

Consequently Xeikon is having the sorts of conversations with customers that the likes of Kodak, Océ, Xerox and Screen are also having. Where the company will struggle, and where all the suppliers that are based in the traditional graphic arts industry will find it difficult, is in talking to the transactional print sector, home of IPDS and AFP. This is not a problem faced by Ricoh InfoPrint, which is selling the same inkjet engine as Screen, though badged as the InfoPrint 5000.

“We have been pleased with our progress. Customers are printing tens of millions of pages a month; and while others are struggling to get into double figures with placements of their presses, we have many times more than this worldwide,” says Clive Stringer, UK sales manager.

From the InfoPrint point of view, transpromo is a more sophisticated form of white space management, where areas around the invoice figures can be used for promotional messaging. It’s a persuasive story, “moving inserts to onserts”, as Stringer describes it. “And the applications are out there. It is no longer just a theory: it works.”

The company is encouraging customers that use its mono InfoPrint 4100 to start running applications normally reserved for colour, and to become familiar with the workflows so that a move to colour a year or two down the line becomes a plug and play switch.

The InfoPrint 5000 runs at 64 metres per minute, though an upgrade to 128 metres per minute is now arriving. It is slow compared with some of the figures attributed to some of the inkjet webs, but this is not necessarily a handicap. “To achieve the returns on these presses you need contracts in place and the volumes already in place. These engines are not cheap to run so there is no need to start big,” Stringer says.

At Polestar Direct, Hibbert endorses this, putting a 60% usage on the Océ Jetstream as the minimum desired loading. He is confident of starting out with 40% capacity in place.

All those involved recognise this is an immature market that is growing as customers become used to the potential. As pressure grows to save money within a corporation, the opportunity for transpromo to step in with its message of combining the essential invoice print with a promotional element is becoming stronger. As Headley at GI Direct points out, sophisticated direct mail was slow to get out of the blocks. “I wouldn’t change anything,” he says. “We have done the right thing.”


Demands on software can be met
The print engines are merely dumb devices without the constant feed of pages to drive them. These pages need to be fully variable, accessing different databases of invoiced information, profiles from marketing analysis and the images associated with this, and personal details of a customer. The documents need to be created instantly and processed just as quickly to keep up with the demands of the engines. And if the resulting data stream can be output-agnostic, including electronic as well as paper communication, so much the better.

At one end of the market is the massive power of HP’s Exstream engine; at the other, XMPie technology or perhaps Pageflex. Sitting across all areas, however, is GMC Software Technology. “We are a truly independent software developer,” says Rhys Morgan, UK managing director. “What we deliver is what the customer wants, not what we have to sell. We can combine data from different databases, create the document; and we understand the Rips in terms of colour and load balancing, for example. Nobody else can do all that.”

The company is headquartered in the Czech Republic, though it has offices across the world, growing from a single developer 15 years ago to 300 people today. Yet it remains almost unknown due to the custom approach it takes to meeting application-specific requirements.

“Transpromo has come of age,” he says. “The market is driving it because large organisations are being forced to look at every element of their spending and they also need to cross-sell and up-sell to existing clients. They are finding that direct mail is no longer that effective and want to deliver their message in the lowest-cost way possible. This is about the right message in the right place at the right time.”