Page 12 - Print21 Magazine May-June 2022

Leading Article
Opening print’s new frontier
Benny Landa’s latest digital print invention is findi g broad acceptance even as we wait for the fi st press to arrive in Australia and New Zealand. Nanography may be the next most important stage in the digital transformation of printing, but we won’t see the fi st local installation until 2023.
Michael Mogridge fi ally escaped Western Australia at the end of March. The industry game changer and digital print
evangelist last visited the eastern states
18 months ago, due to Premier Mark McGowan’s determination to transform WA into a Covid-safe, hermit state. Mogridge is Asia Pacific GM for Landa Digital Printing, the Israeli-based digital press manufacturer. Responsible not only for Australia and the Asian countries, but also for the strategically important market of China, his isolation has taken its toll.
As a long-term observer of the Landa digital experiment, I was keen to catch
up with Michael when he came to Sydney. Perhaps ‘experiment’ is no longer the right word for a project that now has several full-size presses in commercial production around the world. How many? It’s hard
to say without Landa’s confi mation, and they’re not telling, certainly over ten but, I guess, less than twenty.
Nanography is revolutionary, certainly, but it was always an ask to take on faith Benny Landa’s proclamation that he would do for mainstream production what he
and then HP achieved with the Indigo technology a couple of decades before. When he launched Landa Nanotechnology at drupa 2012 it was far from perfect. Transferring
up to seven colours onto an off et belt for one-shot imaging at up to 6500 B1 sheets per hour is a gigantic feat of inventive engineering and technology development. Most of it worked; some of it didn’t.
I remember squizzing sheets with a loupe at the factory in Israel, picking up the artefacts that would delay the introduction of the presses until the following drupa in 2016. Even then the rollout was uneven.
Real world productivity
Then the world shut down. But development continued and, according to Michael, the Landa printing quality is now very good, while the productivity speaks for itself. A Netherlands printer, Reclameland, set a record in March with a Landa S10P press. During the month it completed 3500 jobs (with several orders per job), on 17 different types of paper, three quarters of which were coated paper types. Print speed was 6500 sheets per hour, for a total of 600,000 sheets of paper, all without a single printing plate. That’s real world productivity.
As to the quality, well I take Michael at his word. I haven’t been able to get in front of
a Landa press in a long time. Neither have any of the Australian printers who put down their names in order to secure a place in the
production queue. Following his East Coast visit, Michael tells me their enthusiasm is mostly undiminished, and that the fi st Landa press will arrive in Australia next year. The most likely candidate will come from those who can use the technology best – the trade printers with up to 50 to 100 jobs a day.
He points out that since the arrival
of digital printing 30 years ago, it has
only managed to garner, at most, ten
per cent of printed volumes. The rest remains with conventional, as commercial printers continue to focus on speed
and full-size formats. While Landa has always represented ambition in print,
the company’s B1-size digital presses are targeting the so-called ‘Landa gap’ between short-run digital and long-run offset, they say 90 per cent of conventional commercial and folding carton print.
Having originally introduced Landa’s technology to the local market in the early 1990s, Michael Mogridge is a veteran of the digital transformation in printing. It’s good to see his enthusiasm has not waned, and that he’s ready to take on the next phase.
Patrick Howard
— Editor-at-large
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