Xante Goes Beyond Wide Format

Last month at GraphExpo Frank Romano stopped by the Xante booth and was blown away by a machine that he thinks will change the industry.

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Discussion

Nicely done Frank,
There is a lot of excitement around the Memjet technology but it is as much their different business model that is interesting. With spent ink cartridges and heads swopped out at the same time - ala the desktop printer model - Memjet is facilitating a change in the how the industry thinks of inkjet printers for production applications. It will be interesting to see how the model is accepted in the marketplace.

Thanks for the video and commentary, Frank.

Earlier this year, I sent an e-mail to Memjet and, now, I'd like to share with you (and with those who watch your video) some of what I said in that e-mail. To put my comments in perspective, I'm from the "reprographics" industry, not from the "printing" industry. My comments:

If a memjet print engine can print that fast and is not priced too high, wide-format black & white A/E/C plan printing could easily disappear. A/E/C customers would PREFER that their plans be printed in color. In spite of the demand for plans to be printed in color, most A/E/C customers generally order "plan sets" in black & white, especially when multiple sets of plans are required (which happens several times during the course of every A/E/C project; one of those times is when a project is ready for "bidding" and multiple sets are required to be printed and distributed to General Contractors and Sub-contractors, since they need to estimate the cost of their work, prior to submitting bids for building a project.) On the low-end of the pricing scale, most reprographers price large-format color prints (I'm speaking about prints of A/E/C plans, technical documents, CAD drawings) at least 8x the price of black & white prints. (The price difference is less than that in Europe.) Because of the high multiple (8x being on the low-end), most A/E/C customers do not order plan-sets in color, they only order them in black & white

If and when A/E/C firms find that they can buy "plan sets" in color at the same cost, or very close to the same cost, as plan sets in b/w, well, that will be a "game-changer." There is no doubt about that. Speak to anyone in the A/E/C industry. All plans are drawn using CAD systems. All plans are drawn in color! They are never drawn in black & white. They are only printed in b/w because of cost (prices charged by reprographics firms.)

It's certainly nice that the wide-format memjet-enabled Xante printer will do "full-color" poster-type (and other types of) wide-format color graphics printing. But, the bulk of an A/E/C reprographer's revenue (at least 50% if not more) still comes from printing A/E/C plan sets in black & white; for reprographers, that's where the volume work is and where the bulk of a reprographer's profits come from (still today; at least that’s my opinion.) So, what I'm saying is that a memjet-enabled wide-format printer would be highly successful in the "reprographer" marketplace (producing A/E/C plan sets) even if the quality of "large-format color display graphics work" produced by the memjet-enabled wide-format printer was/is not on par with current wide-format color display graphics printers already out there.

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