This week Océ is holding its annual Open House event in Poing near Munich in Germany. This is a huge event and is stated to be the largest digital printing event in Europe. Océ’s customers and prospects from around the world attend the event to see the latest developments from Océ and its partners. In addition Océ invites a large number of industry analysts and press to spend time at the event. The event is a superb piece of logistics with Océ taking over many of the largest hotels around Munich as well as organizing a major transport operation with buses taking attendees to and from the event.

Océ claims to be the worldwide market leader in continuous feed printing systems with more than 50% of all installations in the past year, and for many people the main items of interest at the Open House were developments in this area in both monochrome and color systems I have predicted that the key announcement at the Open House would be the VarioStream 9240 printer. This was not a difficult prediction on the basis of other models of the VarioStream 9000 range over the past three years. The VarioStream 9240 is the four-color version of this product that is already available in 1, 2 and 3 color duplex versions. The 9000 series is a unique product in that it is a printer that can be upgraded in the field from a monochrome to a color system. It also differs from most other systems in that it is a single pass duplex system with both sides of the page being printed at the same time. While there are other single pass duplex systems from Xeikon and Xerox they are fixed configurations at time of installation and cannot be upgraded to have additional colors in the field. The VarioStream 9240 should start worldwide shipping in Q1 of 2008 but shipments will start soon in the German market.

It is very interesting to look at the Océ approach to color with the VarioStream 9000 series. The technology of the VarioStream 9000 range allows for additional duplex imaging units to be added to the press in the field. Adding an additional imaging unit per color slows the system down. The VarioStream 9210 monochrome system runs at 800 A4 page images per minute (400 images each side of the 20 inch wide web). The 9220 runs at 344 page images/minute, the 9230 runs at 228 page images/minute and the 9240 runs at 168 page images/minute.  In this Océ sees that most of their customers are printing monochrome and they will initially have only a limited demand for color because the key print applications will take time to be color enabled. They see, therefore, it is best to have an upgrade path where customers can progress slowly into color by upgrading their equipment. This can be an incremental path where a VarioStream 9000 may be first upgraded to a two or three-color unit before finally becoming a four-color engine. This is a key approach because in a straight comparison with other continuous feed four-color print engines the VarioStream 9240 is really not competitive compared with other continuous feed color systems.