Page 22 - Print21 November-December 2022

Inkjet Printing
Inkjet arrival
Inkjet commercial printing systems are now offering print businesses serious options, reports Gareth Ward.
up. This is terrific for long runs, but long runs are so 20th century. Book printing is a success story for inkjet, and is the ideal technology for the Amazon age. Indeed, Amazon’s own internal book production facilities use Canon inkjet presses.
Fujifilm has enjoyed success with the Jetpress for high quality colour books, as well as for photobooks and book jackets for novels that are printed on demand on other inkjet presses, HP’s PageWide presses, Canon or Kodak Prospers for example.
Inkjet printing has also transformed transactional printing, inkjet being faster, offering higher quality, greater reliability and
lower cost than laser print for these printers. It also replaces the need to preprint reels on litho presses and then throwing tonnes of paper away when interest rates or terms and conditions change.
The next battles will be tougher. Substrate flexibility is improving for continuous feed inkjet, but is still not a match for litho. There can be marked differences when printing inkjet on papers that are outwardly identical: not all coated papers are the same.
And there is the issue of handling reels of paper. Reels may be less expensive to purchase, but merchants like to provide full reels and not every job conveniently uses a full reel of paper. A switch to continuous feed inkjet is likely to restrict the number of papers a printer will offer.
Transition
Despite these hurdles, there are reasons to suggest the transition may be close. Quality has reached the right level for commercial implementation. Making an investment decision is a challenge when measurable improvements are constantly coming. Improvements will continue, but incrementally and with less frequency.
Trends in the market also play
to the strengths of inkjet printing. Shorter runs, smarter products, and a lack of skills to run traditional presses all favour the digital and automated alternative. It may make little sense to invest in more of the same capacity in an over-saturated market. The labour issue may prove to be the clincher.
Digital printing can change the conversation from price to opportunity, offering smarter products that litho cannot easily deliver
An example might be the university that has always sent out .../continued on page 24
For more than a decade developers have been telling print business owners that inkjet printing is ready for the big time, and that it
is now time to replace offset litho with a digital print technology that can do so much more. For all that time the majority of printers have politely declined the offer and have continued to invest in offset litho. Is it now time to reconsider?
Compare the inkjet transition in print and the development of electric vehicles: both claim to match existing technologies in terms of performance, offer significant advantages in some cases, and yet meet with stubborn resistance from customers who
refuse to share the vision. For electric vehicles it is about range anxiety – what happens after driving for 300 kilometres? Where are the chargers? For inkjet printing it is mostly about cost and productivity. Sheetfed
inkjet presses seem capped at around 3500sph, though the Koenig & Bauer Durst Varijet 106, launched last
year for carton printing, can print at 6000sph. There are no customers to verify the assertion.
Fujifilm’s Jetpress 750 HS can print 5400 B2 sheets an hour in
Above:
High speed, high volume: But is inkjet ready to take on commercial work
1200x600dpi productivity mode, 3600sph in 1200x1200dpi high quality mode. There is now a third option, a ‘value’ mode which removes the primer and so cuts the cost
per sheet by a couple of cents. The Jetpress is already the world’s most popular B2 inkjet press, though the competition is currently limited.
Inkjet throughput increases significantly with continuous feed presses where speeds of 150m/min (again in productivity mode) for piezo powered machines can match the output of a B2 litho press, it is claimed.
But if developers like to compare output to litho in terms of quality and productivity, they are more cautious on cost, where litho holds most of the aces. Where there
is a constant flow of very short
run jobs with relatively low ink coverage, inkjet can also win in cost terms. This is why inkjet is rapidly becoming the dominant technology for printing books. The inkjet press can print sections in sequence and linked to a suitable binding line can go from reel of paper to bound book with no manual handling at all.
The equivalent analogue press required the best part of a day to set
22 Print21 NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2022