The high-speed continuous inkjet press revolution started last year at the IPEX exhibition when the presses previewed two years earlier at drupa started to hit the market. It is interesting to see how rapidly things have moved since that time, particularly since the printing industry is going through such a difficult financial period. Progressive printers have moved rapidly to adopt this technology to create new business approaches. In most cases this is not just buying capacity; it is rethinking business processes to generate new financial opportunities. If one listens to the numbers given from the different vendors it is difficult to assess which companies are doing best in terms of installations. Even then it is still difficult to assess what is truly happening. Many presses are being sold with very attractive financial deals by vendors who are keen to ship their products. This is particularly in the transactional printing space.

While direct mail printers are installing presses, it is the book printing area that has really taken up the technology in the past year, predominantly with HP T300 presses. Kodak has also installed two Prosper 1000 monochrome presses in this market. I have just received a press release from HP showing that one of its first book printing customer in the USA, Courier Corporation has installed its second T300 press for book printing. Its first press is running 24 hours a day, 5 days a week predominantly printing educational publications. Courier, like other book printers such as CPI in Europe, have multiple HP T300 presses, which fundamentally changes the book publishers' business models to use digital printing to cut inventory and improve their profitability. This book printing is on both uncoated substrates and on some of the new specialized inkjet substrates from companies like Appleton and NewPage. The quality I have seen on this work is at least comparable to offset printing, and in many cases, particularly on light-weight substrates, it is superior. We see this with a number of book printers. In Italy Rotolitho Lombardi are using their T300 largely for book printing. Their subsidiary company Rotomail, one of Kodak's largest Versamark customers, is also installing a T300 press instead of their planned Kodak Prosper 5000XL press and plan to use it mainly for book printing. In the USA King Printing Company has installed a T300 press alongside their earlier installed Dainippon Screen Truepress Jet520, and this is also used for book printing. We see book publishers are taking advantage of the opportunity to changing their business using inkjet printing technology. It is HP with their T300 press that is really the big success story in this area of the market. These installed T300 presses are all running at high capacity levels.

I have once again visited HP's first installation of the T300 press, this being O'Neil Data Systems in Los Angeles. The reason for my visit was to see the first installation of HP's new smaller press, the T200. This has just been installed and O'Neil is running as the beta tester for the press. I met with James Lucanish, the General Manager of the company who updated me precisely on what they are doing. This company has a fantastic approach to business and is probably the most progressive company I know in the digital printing market with its "we can do it" approach to business. They do a massive amount of work in personalized digital printing and finishing and I am always amazed at some of the jobs they have automated. They work very closely with the manufacturers of finishing equipment, in particular CMC, to create new ways of doing work. It is interesting that a new device put in Tecnau linked into the inserting line from CMC for one role will allow O'Neil to enter the book printing market, and they have already started doing such work. Another example I saw of how O'Neil is innovating in it's work for clients was a job of 8 million personalized pieces where first the printed web was split, re-moistened for ongoing operations before being cut to pages and then aligned with pre-printed security cards. In this case both the printed pages and cards were personalized and the correct pages and cards had to be combined correctly. To handle this job O'Neil had worked closely with it's suppliers of finishing equipment to bring together the correct systems solution for the job.