This Month's Spectrum Summary:

(The following is an excerpt from the October 2003 issue of Spectrum. Spectrum is a proprietary monthly briefing published exclusively for the clients of I.T. Strategies, Inc. © 2003)

Prototype Production Printers Presage
Second Wave of Industry Growth

We meet this month to discuss the significance of a new class of production printers, inspired in part by staff visits to several recent shows--LabelExpo in Brussels, IGAS in Japan, and GraphExpo in Chicago.

These new machines are seen as the beginning of an important new trend. They are not just downsized digital presses. They rather hold the promise of spreading the advantages of digital printing much more widely among the user base and opening up a new world of applications. The success of the Xerox DocuTech is seen as a forerunner.

The three broad application areas are documents, display graphics, and industrial. The new wave printers are not aimed at replacing traditional analog presses, but rather moving into new applications alongside the analog world. Jobs currently being run on relatively small machines can now increasingly be consolidated and run on one larger machine, intermixing color and mono as needed. This is expected to bring the cost per color copy much closer to monochrome than it has been to date. It means changing the function of print, not just copying its old function.

At IGAS several significant new machines appeared to come out of nowhere. Actually, they are built on large "sunk" investments by major vendors. Press manufacturer Miyakoshi demonstrated their TM1200, a new liquid EP production printer believed to be based on a Toshiba engine, and the MJP600, a very high performance DOD inkjet production printer. Another liquid EP production printer, the Kenroku, was introduced by PFU/Fujitsu. These introductions remind us of important Japanese strengths and could be the beginning of a "second coming" of Japan in digital printing.

Significant new introductions at GraphExpo included industrial packaging printers from Jetrion and Scitex. New printers demonstrated at LabelExpo demonstrated the vitality of this industrial printing application. Here digital is no longer used for just sampling and short runs, but now has arrived as a true production technology. What were formerly money-losing short runs can now be profitable. Among the notable new machines at LabelExpo were the Mark Andy/Dotrix DT Series, the VIP 2020 (HP inkjet engine) and VIP 8020 (Minolta Color EP engine). Also, with HP Indigo's introduction of the ws4000, it looks as though HP resources mated to the Indigo technology is a winning combination.

The Xerox iGen3 is discussed, with questions raised as to whether the high throughput rates needed will curtail the market. To date, however, early users really are running at 400,000 pages per month and it is hoped that with this product family Xerox has tapped a new DocuTech-style oil well. Wide format is seen as healthy but fragmented, dominated by thousands of small users. As the user base becomes more sophisticated, there will likely be sufficient incentive and resources to overcome speed limits imposed by inks and other technology barriers.

We are reminded that we're talking about large, sea changes, cautioned that such changes take time, but that there will be big rewards for those who learn to ride the wave or, better yet, drive the wave.