Recently I shared my visit to Mercury Press and their interesting mix of production inkjet technologies. At that time, I had a chance to look at the first placement of the Landa S10P B1 perfecting press. I was duly impressed at the quality, and more importantly at the genuine appreciation of Mercury’s experience, after only a few months of production. Last week I had an opportunity to meet and hear from the owners of the seven currently installed Landa presses and the future owners of five additional presses that will be installed during the remainder of the year, as well as quite a few interested prospects from around the world.

As you can see from the illustrated map above, the installations and pending installations are a mix of the two currently shipping sheetfed B1 presses, the S10 and the S10P. After two drupas’ worth of introduction, the Landa presses are shipping as fast as Landa is willing to ship them. At this point, they are on track to ship close to 15 by the end of the year. Landa has been metering the shipments of presses to the field in order to ensure that the presses and field support are ready. In speaking with those owners who have the press, even though some of them have been waiting eight or more years for their press, they are glad that Landa has taken their time to release them. Although, when asked if they had any regrets, at least three of them said they wished they had initially purchased two presses instead of one!

As I have mentioned before, one of the holdups has been the development of the AQM (Automated Quality Management) software. Since the Landa presses rely heavily on upgradable software control (think Tesla), AQM is a critical component of the design. Initially Landa outsourced the development of AQM in an effort to focus on the press design, control, and manufacturing. Although it was decided that in order to get a total 360º control, Landa would bring AQM development in house, and “very shortly” they will release the internally developed version of AQM. It is already running very successfully in R&D and at a couple of beta sites.