Andy Tribute previews IPEX 2010

Is the economy turning the corner? Has the printing industry recovered? IPEX 2010 may give us a good idea. Andy Tribute's IPEX preview covers new technology and product rollouts, a potential new Xerox inkjet product, new sheetfed products, Indigo, toner, the Canon-Oce merger, and what may develop with offset. IPEX 2010 could be a great indicator for the industry going forward, and What They Think will have it covered.

IPEX Preview with Andy Tribute

Hi. This is Andy Tribute from WhatTheyThink.com. Today is the start of IPEX and this is an event we've been looking forward for a long time. The vendors have been telling us for the last few months all the things they're planning to show to us.

IPEX comes two years after Drupa when we saw all sorts of innovation, but very little deliverable product. Now at IPEX we see all of those products coming to a stage of delivery, or near delivery and we can get a much better feel for what the impact of those technologies are going to be.

Another key thing about IPEX is it comes hopefully at the start of business moving forward. With the recession having ended, we now wait to see are we going to see a real change and are we going to see investment picking up and the industry starting to move forward and hopefully become profitable again. These are the big questions and it appears that IPEX is going to be a big success. The amount of pre-registrations the IPEX organizers have received from all over the world have been significantly more that previous events and so we're really looking forward to seeing a lot of people coming hopefully to buy and ready to move forward with the way of developments.

I certainly going to find IPEX extremely busy and I've got lots of meetings set up already. WhatTheyThink will be reporting on IPEX from myself and Richard Romano and we'll be talking to all the key players in the industry. There's going to be a lot of press conferences to go to, a lot of meetings with people and hopefully enough time to look around the show; it's a big show. Much, much bigger than shows like GraphExpo or Print. Only second in size, probably, to Drupa.

On the first day, I've meetings with the CEOs in a number of the key companies and this carries on through the week while my diary is almost stacked solid and hopefully most of these will be able to be recorded on video so we can relate to you what is happening and I know Richard is doing exactly the same sort of thing.

So what can we look forward to? Well it's an interesting question. Certainly in the area of Inkjet, this is the thing everybody's talking about. We expect to see some new products we haven't seen before. The general expectation is that Xerox will have their first Inkjet product on display; I wouldn't be totally surprised to see HP bringing out a development of further range of their Inkjet products. So we can see that and then we've also got the new sheetfed products from Fuji Film and Screen where we can see is there going to be a market for B2 Inkjet presses, sheetfed one as this is. We've also got plenty of new or enhanced products in the toner based area. There will be a new press from Indigo. Zycon is showing its enhanced Zycon 8000. Xerox is bringing its new products that come just underneath the igen in the product range, which for the first time show the new toners that can be used or the chemical toners at performance speeds of 100 pages a minute; first time we've seen this.

So there's a lot things we can expect to see. Companies like Rico will be pitching to become a key player within the industry and Canon also will be the first time they're coming here to a show since the acquisition of Ocè. So there's a lot of interesting things to see in that sort of area.

Offset? Well it's going to be pretty quiet for offset. You know, offset is now a very much a case of the top of the development curve and yes we are seeing some amazing developments in offset in terms of the speed of setup. So you're getting make-readies in very few minutes, which makes offset pretty competitive against digital in low-ish run lengths. So we're seeing that sort of structure. We're seeing new presses from Heidelberg and Komori and probably I think also from other suppliers. We're also seeing in the DI market, Press Tech is going into the larger format with B2 format, whereas before they were in the B3.

How will this work and challenge against the digital products in the lower middle-end of the market? So there's a lot of things to look at there.

IPEX is going to have seminars. It's going to have a lot of educational things. There's visitors from all over the world. So it's going to be a very interesting show. It's going to tell us, hopefully, that the industry is coming out of recession and we look forward to seeing lots of visitors really telling that we're ready to go, we're investing, the market's moving and it's all going ahead. That's what we hope. So we'll wait a see.

I will be reporting on a regular basis with videos of interviews, of trends, et cetera, of what's happening at IPEX. And so you can look forward to these throughout the next week or more in terms of seeing just what is happens at the biggest trade show in the world this year.

Thanks so much indeed. This is Andy Tribute for WhatTheyThink.com