A projection being made for next year is that it will be the “inkjet drupa.� To get an indication of what this might mean all one had to do was visit the LabelExpo event in Brussels where a number of new inkjet printing devices were being introduced.

LabelExpo covers the label and tag printing market, a market that is stated to have a value of $63 billion worldwide. LabelExpo is a very analogue market and up to now digital printing has not had a significant impact in this area. Only HP Indigo and Xeikon having an established digital label business, although Nilpeter and Gallus previously had agreements with these two companies. This is a market for mini-web presses and I understand there are more than 30 suppliers of such equipment that can print by offset, flexo, gravure or letterpress, and often a combination of more than one of these technologies. The 33cm (13 inch) wide web appears the dominant format.

In the digital area of this market HP Indigo has in the past few years established itself very strongly with its reel fed ws4xxx product range, the current model being the ws4500. It is understood that HP Indigo are selling around 100 of these machines annually. Xeikon is selling its 330 model into the same market but not with the same level of success. The most interesting aspect of LabelExpo however was the arrival of a number of other suppliers with digital label presses. All of these used inkjet technology rather than the xerographic approaches of HP Indigo and Xeikon. Both HP Indigo and Xeikon announced major partnership agreements to enhance their product lines with enhanced workflow and label finishing equipment.

The following is a brief outline of what was seen of these new inkjet based products all of which are continuous feed presses. The following does not cover developments from companies like Domino and Atlantic Zeiser for print unit add-ons to existing presses for personalisation work.

EFI’s Jetrion subsidiary introduced its Jetrion 4000 press of which the first shipments have already been made in USA. This press has a 4-inch print width and offers four or six colors. An 8-inch web version of the press will be available in the 1st quarter of 2008. The Jetrion 4000 uses Toshiba Tec CA4 print heads that give a multi-drop capability to print grey-scale for high image quality. These heads are water cooled to ensure consistency of imaging. The printer runs at speeds up to 31 metres/min. It prints with Jetrion UV curable inks onto a wide range of different substrates. The price is stated to be $300,000 including an EFI Fiery XL RIP and EFI OneFlow workflow.

Sun Chemical introduced its SolarJet press that looks very similar to the Jetrion 4000. This was developed in conjunction with Imaging Technology International of Boulder, Colorado, and it uses the Xaar 760 grey-scale print heads. The unit only offers four colors and uses Sun’s SolarDot UV curable inks. This press has a 6.7-inch web width. This raises the question why this width since labels appear predominantly to be of 4 or 8 inches in width. The unit is claimed to be ready for beta testing but did not appear to be as finished as the Jetrion press. The target price is defined as €330,000.

Nilpeter showed the new Caslon press co-developed with FFEI. This can be a standalone inkjet press or a hybrid flexo/offset digital press. It print a full 330 mm (13-inch) web width and uses Xaar’s latest 1001 print heads with UV curable inks The price for a full press is around €700,000, but as an add on to an existing Nilpeter press around €500,000. The press runs at a speed of 25 metres/min. Plans are for the first units to be installed by the end of this year.

The French inkjet company Impika announced its new Impika 600 press and was showing the prototype. This runs an 18-inch wide web and prints at a very fast 75 metres/min using aqueous inks. It uses the Panasonic Communications Page Array print head that is a 600 dpi binary head. It is stated to be a label press but with only four colors and only aqueous inks is more suited to transactional or direct mail type applications. The unit with four-colors is stated to have a price around €1 million. I expect to see more of this by drupa, as it really is more of a competitor to products like the Screen Truepress Jet520 printer or Kodak Versamark VX5000E.

Epson showed an intriguing printer as a demonstration of intent for the future. This is a reel fed high-quality printer that runs around 5 metres/min. It prints a 13 by 36 inch area at a time by stopping the web and making multiple passes with its print heads to build up the image in the same fashion as a wide format display printer. It then moves the web and prints the next 36-inch long area. Epson stated the product would be less in cost than all other label printers. With this format the printer could also print many other printed products than just labels. No date is given for this to be a saleable product.

These new presses raised some interesting questions about quality with a range of different opinions among the suppliers. One question covers what is called pinning. Pinning is used on the Nilpeter Caslon and Sun Chemical SolarJet printers as a part ink curing process between laying down each ink color. These two companies claim it improves the quality as simplifies the final UV ink curing. Pinning is a lower power cure and it stops the ink flowing. The amount of pinning can be controlled depending upon the amount of ink flow required. For example a large solid area requires more flow before curing than a fine text area. Jetrion state with their press pinning is not needed as their inks are better formulated to work with their print heads and they don’t need an intermediate cure before the next ink color is laid down. Another question again with these three different presses is whether the imaging deck over which the substrate is moved during imaging should be curved or flat. Both the Nilpeter and Jetrion presses have a curved deck and they claim this is required to maintain optimum tension on the web during imaging. Another key question is how many colors are required for label printing for production. The SolarJet only offers four colors but as it only prints on paper substrates at this time would not require white ink for background that is required when printing on clear film. The Nilpeter Caslon has only four inkjet colors but can use flexo printing units in a hybrid mode for printing backgrounds at lower cost. The Jetrion 4000 is offered with six colors so has more flexibility without ink changes. None of these presses match the flexibility of the HP Indigo ws4500 that has seven colors and also allows for color changing of a color that is not being used while the press is running another job.

The big question is whether these new printers will challenge HP Indigo’s market leading position? They are generally faster than HP Indigo’s 12-inch width ws4500 that has a speed of around 12 metres/min in 5-color mode, but don’t offer the flexibility of having seven colors, any number of which can be used at a time. The new inkjet based vendors claim their printing costs will be lower than those of Indigo, but HP Indigo claims the new presses will not match them in terms of quality or flexibility.

What LabelExpo showed however was a preview of the forthcoming battle between inkjet and xerographic technologies that will be a highlight of drupa 2008.