Just as they did with desktop publishing, newspapers are set to be carried along on the shirt-tails of a revolution paid for by a mass market. How else could you support or justify the research and developments budgets applied to the technology which could soon transform newspaper printing? We're talking digital inkjet and no, it's not new ... but DRUPA was predictably the event for which vendors timed developments they hope will make the publishing market sit up and take notice. It's taken a while: What was then Scitex Digital Printing showed high-speed inkjets in a tent in the centre of the Düsseldorf Messe in 1995, and GXpress stitched a Dayton-printed newspaper sample into its July 2002 issue. And as the potential has been gradually realised, big players have joined in: The Scitex technology is now embraced in Kodak's Versamark and joins a mass of relevant intellectual property, some of it dating to the earliest efforts at imaging film. Hewlett Packard, which had been making low-cost office printers long before it bought Benny Landa's Indigo technology, the giant Xerox Corporation and Agfa are there, the latter through acquisitions and as a substantial investor in inkjet technology company Xaar. Others such as Dainippon Screen and Océ (which has Miyakoshi as an OEM partner) will rely on specialist skills to take a share. It would be hard to tally the development cost, but HP let it be known at DRUPA that it had spent US$1.4 billion ($1.46 billion) on two elements of its inkjet technology alone. Happily, they'll expect to get their money back in the host of market segments in which exponential growth is expected ... and newspapers will be the beneficiary. Because none of the above matters, except that it will deliver a cost-per-copy reality which will open new opportunities for newspaper publishers. Most vendors argue against straight comparison with offset on per copy cost, emphasising the differences: The ability to promptly produce a few copies thousands or even tens-of-thousands of kilometres from a publishing centre; even to produce personalised copies using variable data technology. But beyond the short-term - once the novelty of these benefits has worn off - competition between vendors will come down to cost-per-copy. DRUPA showings confirmed that digital colour printing can be economical enough to be a significant factor in newspaper publishing. And inkjet is the enabler. Agfa, HP, Kodak, Océ and Screen (we've listed them in alpha order, so as not to show preference) all used the Düsseldorf show to stake their claim to a share of that market. Not all had systems ready to install, but all wanted to be considered for developments now being planned. And there was plenty of interest: Everywhere I went, for example, I was told that a team from Fairfax had already been. There's talk too, of an entrepreneurial third party, with rights signed, set to produce multiple publishers' titles locally in a quasi joint-venture. Agfa's inkjet sales director Kurt Smits told me that some see Australia as "potentially the biggest market for digital newspaper printing". Apart from premium products such as newspapers for expats travelling in the expensive seats, digital printing is potentially an alternative to airlifting or trucking copies to remote communities, with the consequent high cost or delay. And the further digital print facilities move down the distribution chain - as they are likely to - the greater the potential for producing editions tailored to the interests of a small group or even personalised for an individual. Overseas, Océ - which has been a pioneer of 'out of market' and short-run newspaper printing with a global network of which Fairfax is a customer - has a German customer who puts daily editions in the hands of first-class rail travellers not much more than an hour after editorial deadline. 'Handelsblatt News am Abend' - dubbed "the fastest newspaper in the world" - prints at 14 sites within 90 minutes of the editorial deadline. Among the 20,000 readers are first class travellers on DB's intercity express who have copies in their hands within an hour-and-a-half of the 2 pm press start. The cooperation goes back to 2000 when Océ printed A4 copies of the evening paper at CeBIT. Agfa says the first newspaper customer for its inkjet web will be printing papers for homesick holidaymakers in Portugal and Spain from this month. In Illinois, the 'Chicago Tribune' has been experimenting with digital print since April last year, using on Kodak inkjet equipment to produce copies of hyperlocal editions which complement its TribLocal web portal, and distributing them with the parent title. A fifth print edition was launched last month and with the addition of three more suburbs - Romeoville, Plainfield and Goss's home town of Bolingbrook. The TribLocal - a further combined edition is promised soon. And needless to say that free copies of the 'Sydney Morning Herald' on Océ's DRUPA stand were gladly snapped up by Aussies during their enforced week or two in Düsseldorf. It's a fair bet that inkjet is the technology which will dominate, but vendors have a habit of discounting technologies they don't own, so some knocking of inkjet has been taking place. Anne Mulcahy, chief executive of toner printing ace Xerox, was quoted during the first week of DRUPA discounting inkjet on quality grounds, unless the image could be stabilised on the sheet. But hey, Xerox has such a technology in the 'phase change' system it acquired with Tektronix ... so maybe a related high-volume development is in the pipeline? In the meantime, HP's Edgeline thermal achieves the same effect by laying down a bonding agent on areas to be imaged, and UV curing - Agfa's biggest strength - may be a viable alternative. Then there's the 'drop-on-demand' versus continuous inkjet argument: Improved recirculation may address the argument that continuous is wasteful, but all of this may be eclipsed by the manufacturing economies of scaleable inkjet. And as Agfa showed at DRUPA, inkjet is capable of some very high quality printing on a wide variety of substrates ... and perhaps even the same press used to print newspapers. Xerox and Océ, which both have toner-based web presses pitched primarily at the 'transpromo' (transactional/promotional) market, argue the 'improved quality' case for their newspaper applications. But publishers have travelled this route before, opting in most cases for newsprint rather than improved (or even coated) stocks, demanding sheet brightness (at least outside Japan) and colour quality, but settling for the cost/quality compromise which goes with printing on a surface resembling that of a beermat. The 'look and feel' of newsprint is a popular starting point, with weight advantages where editions such as the 78-page broadsheet 'Herald' Océ printed at the show are concerned. Xerox has been working with publishers and others on its 490/980 continuous-feed digital web including showings at Eveleigh, Sydney centre and is now ready to take orders. The company claims the system, with its 'flash fusing' technology, is the world's fastest using xerographic-based technology. The challenge now will be to convince potential users that the option is attractive against inkjet. That issue has already been addressed by Océ, which has supplemented its toner-based sheet and web-fed systems with an inkjet web based on a Miyakoshi OEM and its own frontend. The system - with several levels of speed and pricepoint - is the necessary complement to the infrastructure Océ had the good sense to build when it established a 'not-for-profit' digital newspaper network alliance in 2000. Customers including Fairfax Media have taken advantage of an alliance which links half a dozen print sites around the world, most of which engage in other work during the day. Additionally the company works with NewspaperDirect, which prints 70 different titles at 800 locations. International newspaper market segment manager Michaela Frisch says the process used has typically depended on publishers' requirements. Existing options have included the sheetfed VarioStream 6000 with limited colour - used by the German publisher of 'Handelsblatt News am Abend' - and the toner-based web systems are in use at the six digital newspaper network sites. DRUPA adds two new options: A faster ColorStream 10000 - upgradeable from one to four colours - and importantly, the inkjet JetStream shown in the USA and at the company's headquarters in Poing, Germany, last December. Speeds of 100, 150 and 200 metres/minute are available for the webfed system. Web widths up to 543 mm are available and considered adequate for the application. Frisch says each additional 10 mm of width costs $1 million in developments and suggests, "The effort may not be worth it". Océ's OEM partner Miyakoshi also offers its own single and two-tower inkjet systems which use hot air roll drying, including the MJP600 introduced at IGAS last year. Nor is Kodak - with the 1995 DRUPA launch I mentioned earlier - a newcomer to the business, although there has been a tendency to blow hot-and-cold with this application of the Versamark technology, perceived as expensive for newspaper applications. This issue was canvassed in a DRUPA media conference at which Kodak chairman and chief executive Antonio Perez discounted the US$6 million ($6.25 million) mentioned by one commentator for Versamark, replacing it with talk of $1.2-$1.3 million 'negotiable' and a top price-tag of $4 million. The suggestion is that the Stream system - with its broad range of products - may command a higher price. Kodak believes it has inkjet's 'killer app' in Stream which, according to Perez, will be the technology "which applies to most jobs". Even if it's not the best technology for printing newspapers as we know them, it's easy to see that the cost equation associated with a mass-production offset-replacement technology might carry the news market along with it. A promotional video outlines the key technology, which involves high-pressure jets of ink being warmed to turn them into streams of droplets. Small ones are blown away into a recycling system, but what happens then isn't clear. 'Accurate placement of high-specification inks' sounds good, but mention of 'Kodak optimised glossy papers" leaves flexibility open to question. We're sure there's more to it than that, and that Kodak isn't bidding to push Norske Skog aside and take over newsprint manufacturing. Kodak also has drop-on-demand technology, and showed a Versamark-branded VL2000 machine with a 475 mm web width, rated for up to 76 metres/minute. Meanwhile, the Stream concept press, running on a Müller Martini platform, is 'for sale now', Perez says. Kodak cites the SpencerLab report it commissioned as confirmation Stream may potentially match 175 lpi offset quality. "With speed upward of 500 ft/minute (153 metres/minute) and print quality comparable to or approaching offset, it has the potential of being a key player in this growth segment," the report says. SpencerLab found gamut 35 per cent larger and black density 29 per cent higher than offset. On the downside, primary colour and black text were rendered thicker with less edge sharpness. Agfa has been investing in inkjet - by acquisition and through direct and indirect research - for years, but is still seen in some quarters as a late arrival. Either way, it is catching up fast and says it wants to be the leader in industrial UV-curable ink. For that reason it was hardly surprising that its digital newspaper offering - the two-engine Dotrix Transcolor - was running UV. Built on a substantial platform from UK flexo specialist Edale, it prints wet-on-wet CMYK using 12 heads, staggered across the 630 mm web width. Inkjet sales director Kurt Smits says Agfa has worked hard since its 2004 acquisition to make Dotrix a stable, productive system, and he's especially proud of the automated system which cleans heads between runs. The wave technology used leads to multiple droplets merging in flight - some droplets travel faster to create bigger drops enabling the eight levels of grey for each colour. Each unit has fixed heads which print on one side of the web only but Smits says the greyscale ability means that a 360 dpi head can deliver quality equivalent to 1200 dpi. The system has an Agfa front-end, and while its four groups of heads produce a colour gamut claimed to be greater that some six-colour systems, there is room for a couple more. Running inert (nitrogen-assisted) UV, the Transcolor is flexible enough to print a wide range of other substrates including synthetics and the speed - currently 24 metres/minute is set to be increased to 30 metres/minute. The cost picture is still emerging: A price of 1.5 million Euros ($2.43 million) is being mentioned for the two-engine system, and Agfa claims its presses are more economical than flexo presses in packaging applications up to 15,000 metres and beyond. While costs in offset production might be 70 per cent paper and 20 per cent ink, Smits says with digital 50-60 per cent of the cost will be ink. There's a benefit however, for colourful titles as the cost of black and colour ink is the same. True costs will vary according to circumstance, and Agfa has developed a application model into which variables can be factored to get a realistic assessment. Smits, whose 19-year career with Agfa spans roles in both newspaper and inkjet markets, talks of a range of 'out of market' newspaper applications, and says interest has come from a variety of sources - including publishers, printers, distributors and entrepreneurs. The business model for Agfa's first customer - a July start-up in Lisbon, Portugal - is in stark contrast to the haphazard approach of a freelance distributor with an old truck, who might sell 5000 copies one day, 20,000 another. A joint venture will print and deliver precise quantities, closer to publication times, while filling free machine time with transactional print. Hewlett Packard's newcomer at DRUPA was a whopping twin-engine line with a 914 mm web width to match - the biggest among the inkjet webs at the show - on which a variety of jobs were bring printed reel-to-reel. Here the technology is HP's Edgeline thermal inkjet which uses inks and a bonding agent applied to the paper surface ahead of the inks and credited with maximising colour gamut. The company says early applications for photo kiosks had five silicon printhead chips (called die) each with 2112 nozzles to print at about 53 metres/minute, which was expected to increase by at least 40 per cent. The high nozzle count - each 110 mm-wide printhead has 10,560 of them - improves image quality, productivity and fault tolerance, and HP says these heads will be user-replaceable. Clever technologies - and the company says it has spent US$1.4 billion on Edgeline and its scaleable printing technology - deliver automatic calibration and nozzle substitution to maintain performance. The inkjet web press at DRUPA shows just how the technology can be scaled up, printing a 600 x 600 dpi image at 122 metres/minute on a 'production platform' configuration. Pigment ink is water-based, and project manager Ron Hall says a dryer could be added if required, with the facility to turn off segments. In the DRUPA technology demonstration, ten print bars - two per colour plus two for a bonding agent - are ranged across the 914 mm. Although it's highly scalable, commercial versions are likely to be limited to 762 mm. HP has lined up partner finishing solutions including Hunkeler's 660 mm newspaper and book signature system, an MBO/Ehret sheeter combination and Müller Martini book finishing. The first product from a new high-speed production systems division, it is scheduled for release in the second half of next year with a 'target' price of US$2.5 million ($X.XX million) for a two-engine machine. HP Indigo sales director for Asia Pacific and Japan Michael Mogridge says the breakthrough, when the machine is released, will be in cost per page Against such competition, Dainippon Screen appears a tiddler, despite its position as one of the largest prepress systems makers and a supplier to the semiconductor and flat panel display manufacturing industries. At DRUPA it showed a prototype sheetfed inkjet system it expects to release in about a year, together with the web-fed Truepress Jet520 it first announced in 2006. Two Jet520 versions were shown - a full twin-engine duplex line was seen producing international newspapers including the 'Daily Mail', 'Le Monde', 'El Pais' and 'Asahi Shimbun' as well as books and other work - and a new single engine duplex which can print either the full 520 mm width of the machine on one side of the web or up to 250 mm on both sides. Screen also has a new variable data application and a dedicated newspaper workflow application for newspapers, both based as plugins to Adobe's InDesign. At a media conference, the inscrutable Japanese were unwilling to discuss the head technology in their B2 and concept press. The newspaper system however uses Epson heads which deliver multi-size droplets for greyscale resolution of up to 720 x 720 dpi at up to 64 metres/minute. Maximum speed of 128 metres/minute is based on half that resolution, productivity the company says equates to 1200 48-page tabloids in an hour with savings of up to 30 per cent through reduced ink use. Print on demand division director Yoshinori Tsuruya says more than 50 print engines have been installed in its first year on sale. "This is a machine that is available today and one that is already being used to produce a wide range of different work," he says. The crossover into transpromo printing is likely to sustain not only users but vendors: Screen for example has three Jet520s at mailing house GI Direct in Leicester, UK, where some of its show literature was printed and there are other players in the smaller (and slower) part of the web inkjet market. And like their larger rivals, they claim to have achieved the combination of speed, quality and cost. What now? Australian publishers have generally kept away from the outsourcing model - popular in the UK and increasingly the USA - for their main offset-printed editions. By contrast however, the 'distribute-and-print' digital model is ideally suited to shared production. Placed near to the point of delivery, the opportunities are immense and Australia, we can believe, is the place to make them happen. gx
