This Month's Spectrum Summary:

(The following is an excerpt from the March 2007 issue of Spectrum, a proprietary monthly briefing published exclusively for the clients of I.T. Strategies, Inc. © 2007)

Electrophotography Paves the Path for Inkjet to Win
the High-End Document Sweepstakes

This month we sit down with Mark Hanley to discuss what looks like a contradiction. Inkjet is widely seen as having inherent advantages compared with electrophotography (EP). Yet market figures currently, and for the foreseeable future, show EP continuing to be much larger than inkjet. We focus mainly on the high-end document and digital press markets.

Here EP has been disappointing in that it has not come close to displacing analog as the major printing technology. Might inkjet succeed where EP has failed? Vendors show signs of believing it might and a few impressive new high-end inkjet printers have recently been launched or announced. Three worth watching are the Agfa Dotrix TransColor, Dainippon Screen Truepress Jet520, and the Riso 5500 high speed piezo inkjet array products. Major EP vendors, becoming aware of the limitations of EP and the potential of inkjet, now have at least some involvement or investment in inkjet including FujiFilm, Olympus, Toshiba, Kodak, Ricoh and others.

Scalability is seen as a major inkjet feature in terms of print width, productivity, media/chemistry flexibility and incremental cost for color. Questions remain such as reliability of fixed array inkjet and print quality compared with EP and offset. These are expected to be resolved soon. The more significant barrier is seen as the degree of commitment by vendors.

Looking at market development patterns, it is felt that parallel development will continue for a while. But in time the predominant part of the market, that wanting the new services, will grow, while the older part of the market, even with better economics, becomes less significant. This is termed indirect substitution in that the new set of users may be quite different from the old.

EP is seen as paving the path for high end inkjet. People in very large numbers thanks to EP understand what inkjet as a more scalable digital technology can do for them. Observers see recent EP product launches as evidence that these vendors are becoming increasingly aware of the potential of inkjet to invade their high-end markets. But at the same time they have set the stage for inkjet to invade their world on the level predicted for them, but which they are unlikely to achieve.