Hello, this is Andy Tribute of WhatTheyThink.com once again reporting from Graph Expo.  I’d like to introduce something that I would like to classify as a new classification for inkjet and it’s called the New Life Old On classification.  And basically this is converting your fully paid for, high speed web offset press into digital press. 

Now, this is not new, we’ve been doing this for a long time with imprinting heads which you put onto the press that does do a degree of customization and we’ve had these as continuous inkjet heads with Kodak with the same heads as Diverseamarks and recently Kodak has been putting the Prosper S10 Printing Head monochrome onto offset presses. 

Now I’ve always thought that this sort of area was a monochrome only, but no, it’s now color.  Now this is not the case that Kodak is producing a four color imprinting system, but there are a lot of very clever integrators out on the market.  And on the trade floor is a company called AdForce.  And AdForce is showing a four-color imprinting system to add onto the backend of an offset press.  And the first one has already been installed, linked to the back of a Goss Sunday Press, 38 inches wide with the ability of having color imprinting in four different areas on the web at full running speeds of 1,000 feet per minute at 16 Prosper S10 heads accurately aligned on this to do four high quality color on the press at speed.  So, very interesting to see what can be done on that. 

In fact, at this show, we tend to have – we have a thing called the “must see ‘ums” and with lots of items that have been chosen beforehand. I would say – I would like to classify Adforce as the first recipient of a “Wish I’d seen It” award, because I’m sure lots of people didn’t see this one.  It really is impressive. 

But the imprinting side is happening and one of the other things that’s interesting is if you look on the HP stand, you’ll see the first of an imprinting system, and they have, using scalable printing architecture, an imprinting head to add on to the back of an offset press running at 800 feet a minute.  So this market is taking off. 

There are other players in this one area as well.  You’ll see, for example, Atlantic Zeiser, the German specialist company doing this sort of thing as well.  But also, you’ll find this is being done elsewhere.  I was involved in running a very interesting seminar last night at which Arlo Donnelly was the speaker talking about the things they’ve done with the process jet, they’re own home-developed inkjet system that I’ve written about before.  And what they were saying on that is that they’ve now added the process jet modular, which is basically an add-on imprinting system using the same technology onto offset presses.  And so they’ve now got their first offset presses running with full color imprinting on the web, running at up to 1,200 feet a minute on web offset presses. 

So, interesting way of saying, “I’ve already paid for my web offset press, but I’d like to do digital on it as well.”  So suddenly you have this capability of doing this sort of thing. 

And while I’m talking about Arlo Donnelly, interesting announcement they made yesterday on the process jet situation where they’ve developed their own presses.  They’re now introducing a 60 inch wide press for the book printing market.  So twice as wide as any other press in the industry and running at 1,000 feet a minute.  That’s humongous.  That’s really going to change the book printing market in many ways.  So it’s going to be fascinating to see what happens on that. 

So that’s what’s basically happening in the inkjet market.  Thank you very much indeed; this is Andy Tribute for WhatTheyThink.com.