Page 28 - Print21 Magazine March April 2021

Technology
Digital colour drive
The latest generation of cut-sheet toner digital colour printers offer
a whole lot of bang for your buck, reports Print21 editor Wayne Robinson.
A wide market
Commercial printers are well served, with Fuji Xerox, Konica Minolta, Ricoh and Canon Production Print
all investing enormous sums into research and development for their cut-sheet digital toner printers, which range from entry level to high end.
Then there is Kodak with its Nexpress digital toner colour printer at the high end, and Epson with its inkjet- based Workhorse entry level printer.
And of course the big one: the
HP Indigo range. It is a toner-based system, but quite different from the others in that it has a proprietary liquid toner, or liquid ink as it calls it. Productivity is higher than the toner- based systems, as is the investment level. The range of HP Indigo digital colour presses is large, and so is the growing customer base.
When it comes to standard toner presses, Canon’s ImagePress C910 series is aimed at the lower-volume end of the market. There are three models in this series, the C910,
C810 and C710, producing 90, 80
and 70ppm respectively. They are designed to produce monthly volumes of 40,000 to 167,000 A4 pages but can handle monthly peak volumes up to 500,000 A4 pages. These printers have 2400 x 2400dpi resolution with a default 190lpi screening pattern. Canon’s ImagePress C910 series is a light production digital printer able to run at speeds of up to 90ppm.
At the other end of the scale, Kodak introduced the Nexfinity. It is the latest generation of the Nexpress dry toner printer, with a new high resolution and multi-bit LED writing system giving 1200 x 1200dpi and 256 levels of exposure on the imaging cylinder. It is capable of producing up to 152 A4ppm, and handles standard sheets up to 356 x 520mm.
Indeed, most vendors have looked at ways to improve the overall image quality of their presses, and particularly the colour management over longer runs so that they can produce more consistent results.
Ricoh updated its production printers last year, starting with the flagship Pro C9200. There are two models in the series: the C9200, which can produce up to 115ppm
A4 and average monthly volumes of 245,000 sheets; and the C9210, which runs at 135ppm A4, with an average monthly volume of 300,000 A4 sheets. Both have inline sensors for auto calibration and auto adjustment to improve registration, plus Auto Colour Diagnosis technology that
Sometimes you have to pinch yourself.
Small format colour printing today is so far removed from its recent
past it is often hard to credit. Gone are the SRA3 offset presses, needing to have their ink and water balance carefully managed by highly trained operators, and needing plates prepared by equally highly-trained and expensive staff.
Not quite gone but certainly diminished is the finishing, with today’s digital colour presses offering inline solutions – sheets go in one end and printed, folded, stitched booklets come out of the other.
No wonder that sales of A3 offset presses are now rarer than hen’s teeth, especially when you consider that a full inline system can be yours for a fraction of the cost of offset – a $100,000 budget will get you into the commercial print world.
The rise of toner
Many in the industry were sceptical when the toner-based digital presses first appeared two decades ago. But today there is no question of their
28 Print21 MARCH/APRIL 2021
Digital toner printing: Full-colour from screen to page
ability to produce quality that is at a high level, and certainly more than good enough for the person in the street. I was at a print shop recently, which has entry-level and high-
end digital printers and the owner said his clients did not perceive any difference between the two in terms of their quality.
Cut-sheet electrophotographic printers are now the mainstay
for many print service providers producing work on a variety of different media. They have proven their worth for producing short-run, fast turnaround jobs.
Cut-sheet toner presses have
seen off offset in A3, and have not succumbed to inkjet printing, which is on the march. This is due to their ability to print to materials without needing pre-treatment, their ease of use, and image quality.
Until recently, the cut-sheet
A3 market was split between heavy-duty, mid-range and light printers, but those distinctions are blurring. Flexibility of print, speed of throughput, and flexibility of media, and of media size are the key distinctions these days.