After all the hype for the past few years including the so called “Inkjet drupa,” now things are really starting to happen in the high-speed inkjet market. In the past couple of years we have seen a number of sales of these presses, but most have been in the transactional print areas, with a lesser number in the direct mail area. In terms of numbers probably the leading supplier has been Infoprint Solutions, the IBM/Ricoh company. They have moved, to my understanding, approaching 200 presses into their existing transactional print markets, where goods deals have done with those customers wanting to move into printing color in one pass onto their documents. Again to my understanding Kodak have probably been the number two supplier with the Versamark VL series presses, again mainly into the transactional markets.

Very little at this time has happened in moving continuous feed inkjet color presses into the graphic arts and publishing markets. In the book printing area we have seen a few sales into book printers that are working with their publishing customers to change their business models to try to reduce the massive inventories of printed books these publishers and their distributors hold in warehouses. In the newspaper area all we are seeing at this time, at least that I can talk about, are a few systems being installed for printing of international newspapers in foreign locations.

Despite this slow take-off I do expect that this year we will see the sales of these presses accelerate into graphic arts and publishing applications. In fact I wrote a little of this in my last article. What however I am seeing is a lack of understanding in what are the realities of this inkjet market, and what buyers really should know before investigating the purchase of such a press. What I am seeing is a lot of misinformation being given by various sales people when discussing their products.