Our Autumn reporting volume was boosted by 14 presses installed in Russia. This time our report covers 26 presses at 23 companies, primarily in the EU (12), US (8), and UK (5). This report includes a few presses installed earlier this year, but not publicly announced until recently and at least one that may have been installed late in 2022. We will be publishing a full true-up report of presses installed in 2023 (versus reported in 2023) separately.

Some Firsts and Notables

Ricoh had a whole lot going on at the end of 2023. The Z75 finally made it to market and the Pro VC80000 launched with immediate availability, so two of our notables are from Ricoh, but Canon, Domino, EFI and Screen had some interesting things to talk about too.

• Concord Flooring in California picked up one of the first EFI Cubik industrial presses for wood décor.  The Cubik is included as “sheet fed” but at 8 colors and up to a 55 inch print width, it is its own animal. For context, B1 format is 27.8 x 39.4 inches.
• Book printer, Mediaprint Solutions in Germany reported the installation of a Canon varioPrint iX3200 last year and we found that they had previously snuck a Screen TruePress Jet 520HD in there without us noticing.
• When we learned about commercial printer, Perfect Communications in New Jersey installing a Canon ProStream 3133 in December, we also learned that they had previously installed two Canon VarioPrint iX 3200 presses that had not made our list.
• QRT Graphique is the first customer in France using the N610i label printer and Domino’s first digital printing company overall in the country. Vive l'impression d'étiquettes!
• Also, in France, Ricoh delivered their first European installation of the Z75 B2 press to Realisaprint.com. The online printer is also the first installation following their first beta site (Heeter).
• Speaking of beta sites, long-time Ricoh customer Sattler Media Group in Germany was the beta site for the Pro VC 80000 and announced at the end of the year that it was in production.

Now for the formats. We had a bit of an anomaly in the last report with roll leading sheet-fed installations with lots of roll-label presses in the mix. This time we have about 57% sheet and 43% roll, or 53% to 47% if we take the EFI Cubik out of the mix. Sheet fed breakout is 5 B1, 6 B3 and 3 B2. Unlike last time, 2-up roll made up 64% of the roll-fed installations and the rest were roll-label.

Application Segments: With the big push into graphic arts in 2022 and 2023 it’s not surprising that nearly a quarter of the presses were intended for commercial/graphic arts applications. Four presses are targeting various publishing applications (books, manuals, catalogs) and another 4 are dedicated to labels. Also 3 for display and signage, 2 for packaging, 2 for direct mail and 1 each for transaction print and wood decoration. Yes, transaction printing and wood decoration were tied for last place. What does that tell you about inkjet printing trends?

Which OEMs?: With the Russia focus removed, Hanglory Group has disappeared from the list. We actually had 17 OEMs last report and only 11 showing up this period. Canon continues to report the most installations (7) closely followed by Screen (5) and out of the blue comes EFI with 4 installations for the period. If we were counting by dollar volume instead of units, EFI would have knocked it out of the park.  Ricoh reported 3 installations. We found one each for Domino, Fujifilm, HP, Konica Minolta, Landa, RISO and Xeikon.

As always, we ask that if you are aware of others that we have not covered, please let us know. You can find more details on individual press models on the Inkjet Device Finder.

Winter 2023 (November/December) Roundup

If you are an OEM and want to report a recent installation, please get in touch with [email protected] or [email protected]  and we will happily share your announcement.