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Cary Sherburne:  Hi, I'm Cary Sherburne, Senior Editor at WhatTheyThink.com and I'm here with Dieter Schilling, who is President and CEO of Delphax Technologies.  We're here at Drupa 2012.  Welcome.

Dieter Schilling:  Thank you, Cary.

Cary Sherburne:  And you've got a -- you've got a pretty big announcement here.  Actually it was maybe weeks a little ahead of time, but maybe you can talk to us a little bit about Elon and this is your first venture into color really, in the company.  Maybe you can talk about sort of how that transpired and why you picked memjet technology to be the base.

Dieter Schilling:  Okay, gladly.  We have been in the equipment business for the printing industry for 30 plus years as a company.  All the time, with a monochrome device and we realized the future was going to be color, at a minimum.  And so we had to look at the opportunities and the technologies that were available across a broad spectrum and decided that inkjet was probably going to be the future for color and production capabilities.  And furthermore we looked around and decided that memjet had probably the best promise in terms of cost capabilities, disrupting the cost curve that was out there already, and also quality, at 1600dpi.  So we partnered up -- we were talking to memjet five years ago already and had been working on a development with them since 2009 and are excited to be bringing Elon to market at this Drupa.

Cary Sherburne:  And when will it be commercially available?

Dieter Schilling:  We plan to do commercial shipments after our beta program is completed towards the end of this year, early next year.  So a year from now we'll be doing commercial shipments.

Cary Sherburne:  Okay.  So your beta program starts towards the end of the year?

Dieter Schilling:  Correct, yes.  

Cary Sherburne:  And then just -- I don't want to get in to a lot of speeds and feeds, but this is a production level machine.

Dieter Schilling:  That's correct.  Yes, at 500 images, A4 images per minute.  Standard duplex.  It definitely is in a production class.

Cary Sherburne:  And so the real game-changer here though is the price.

Dieter Schilling:  Yes.  We are targeting a price of under $500,000 for a standard Elon system and that is with a basic high-capacity input feeder and high-capacity stacker.

Cary Sherburne:  Duplex.

Dieter Schilling:  Duplex.  Standard on every machine; 500 A4 images.

Cary Sherburne:  So that's a third or even less than a third in some cases than the competition.

Dieter Schilling:  Absolutely.

Cary Sherburne:  And you're going to make money on that?

Dieter Schilling:  We are going to make money on that.  We have some new paradigms that we're working with in our company.  We're changing; cost is very important, but our goal at the beginning was to have differentiated technology, number one, number two to make inkjet, high-quality inkjet affordable for mid-range to small-commercial printers and I think we're going to achieve that with Elon.

Cary Sherburne:  So when you talk about high-quality and you and I have talked about this before, I saw some early samples and they were kind of, well, you know, they were okay but they looked a little chalky or whatever and I understand that the quality has improved quite a bit.  In fact, I have in front of me here, this was printed, you tell me, directly on photo paper without any kind of coating or treatment or anything and obviously it's not going to show up well on the screen for our viewers but I'll tell you this is pretty impressive.

Dieter Schilling:  We consider it quite stunning and when we got in to the venture with memjet we knew that it would take some faith but we saw the potential of the technology and what we're doing today is an improvement over what was done a year ago and what we're going to be doing next year when we launch is going to be improvement over what we have today.  We're very confident about that.

Cary Sherburne:  Well that's great.  We really appreciate you sharing the news with us at Drupa and we'll come down and check out your booth.

Dieter Schilling:  Thank you, Cary.  And we look forward to our North American launch this fall, in October, at Graph Expo.

Cary Sherburne:  Graph Expo.  We'll be there, too.

Dieter Schilling:  So welcome everybody -- all right.

Cary Sherburne:  Okay.  Thanks.

Dieter Schilling:  Thank you, Cary.

 

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