I am currently attending an interesting sort of trade show in Switzerland. This is the Hunkeler Innovationdays in Lucerne and I will be writing about this event in the Print CEO. At this event most of the major digital printer suppliers were showing products and their linkages with the Hunkeler finishing systems. There were a few new announcements but perhaps the major announcements came from Kodak.

Last year at drupa Kodak introduced their new drop on demand inkjet high-speed color press, the Kodak Versamark VL2000. This is the first drop on demand press from Kodak and countered all Kodak’s previous arguments that the future of inkjet was only going to be found with continuous inkjet technology, as used in all other Versamark products. The New Versamark VL 2000 press was similar to many other new inkjet color presses with a print width of 20 inches and a speed of 75 meters/min in four-color mode. I commented at the time that I felt that this was the first of a range of presses using the same technology and we could expect to see a development of the press running at 150 meters/min (500 ft/min). The reason for this was that the press used print heads fro another supplier that could operate at 75 meters/min in two-color mode and 150 meters/min in single color mode. The Versamark VL2000 had to print head arrays to handle four colors and thus ran at 75 meters/min. (I think you will find that you read this first in WhatTheyThink.com around one year ago).

Today the new Versamark VL6000 press was announced and believe it or not it runs at 150 meters/min. While Kodak has not stated how this higher speed is achieved you can be sure there are now four print head arrays in the product. The press can also still run at 75 meters/min but in doing so the print resolution increases allowing higher quality printing. Kodak also announced a further new product this being the Versamark VL4000 and this runs at 125 meters/min but with a reduced resolution of 600 x 360 dpi (compared with the 600 x 600 dpi of the other presses). This is an upgrade of the VL2000 and from my understanding this is predominantly a software upgrade to the presses controller. All these presses can be run as single of dual engine systems. The dual engine systems are the Versamark VL 2200, 4200 and 6200.