Tho roughbred s
of Digital Prin
ting
This month marks the end of an era for Xerox as CEO Anne
Mulcahy retires and Ursula Burns takes over. While the word era
might seem strong, Mulcahy’s 9-year reign began during one of the
company’s most critical periods of transformation, as its executives
decided to move beyond the office space and deeper into high-end
graphic arts production. In the early days of her leadership, despite the
company’s financial troubles and SEC accounting investigations,
Mulcahy refused to drop-off Xerox’s relatively large R&D budget. The
iGen3 press – first introduced in 2000 under the code name FutureColor
– was just starting to reach commercialization.
by Jon Robinson
Just days after taking over the CEO post, Mulcahy
stepped onto the world-printing stage at the drupa
2000 exposition in Germany. This particular event was
dubbed the digital drupa, because of the printing innovation spurred on years earlier by Benny Landa and
his Indigo press. While Indigo revolutionized the digital press, Xerox might just as easily claim its invention
when Chester Carlson discovered Xerography back in
1938.
When Mulcahy again took centre stage at drupa in
2008, she walked into what was loosely referred to as
the inkjet drupa. In just a few sentences, she shocked
most of the media at the press conference by publicly
challenging long-established inkjet makers and aggressively proclaiming Xerox would soon better the
current inkjet landscape for commercial printers: “I’ve
heard all the talk about this being the inkjet drupa.
Well, that’s good but it’s not even close to being good
enough. We have no intention of duplicating the inkjet
technology in the marketplace today. The limits of it
are too, well, limiting – and the applications for which
it can be used are too small. Instead, we’ll do what we
do best….make it better. We’re taking the concept of
inkjet to the next level so that the business opportunity for commercial printers has legs that are well
worth the investment.”
While inkjet printing has been under mass development since the 1960s and already made particularly
strong showings in large-format display production,
most everyone agrees the technology is still far off in
terms of making viable inroads with commercial
printers. (For whatever reason, tech pundits have
found a strong correlation between invention and 50
years of maturation before a particular technology becomes disruptive. They give examples like the railroad,
the Internet and certainly toner-based production
printing fits, thanks to Xerox’s 1990 introduction of
the DocuTech, as might single-pass inkjet printing
sometime after 2010.)
Even before Mulcahy’s drupa 2008 proclamation,
there was little doubt, that at some point in the future,
Xerox would need to direct its digital innovation toward
inkjet if it hoped to stay relevant in the high-end printing marketplace. Toner-based technology, based on the
process of electrophotography, over the past few years
has proven itself to fit very nicely with the short-run
printing needs of commercial printing, but the technology saturated the market very quickly and, as of yet,
has not lived up to the promises of taking over vast
chunks of offset production. This is wholly an issue of
format size, as physics – specifically the ability to carry,
stabilize and manipulate static charges – places very real
limitations on the ability to increase the width of electrophotostatic drums used in toner-transfer imaging.
As such, while toner-based technology will continue
to slowly eat away at specific offset applications, it cannot match the economic reasoning behind the large-format production methods of offset presses.
(Presumably, if NASA can put someone on the moon,
Xerox, Indigo, Kodak, Océ, Ricoh, Konica Minolta,
Xeikon or some company can increase the size of an
electrophotostatic drum, but clearly it would take too
much time and money to figure out exactly how.)
Consider, for example, that in the nine years since digital drupa, Xerox has not increased the imaging width
of its original iGen3, which itself cost $1 billion in development over seven years. While the original iGen3
had an imaging area of 14. 3 x 20. 5 inches, the iGen4
now has an imaging area of 14.33 x 22. 5 inches, which
is currently the largest format for a toner-production
machine in the market. (HP is in second place with the
12.48 x 18.26-inch imaging area of the Indigo 7000.)
The potential for inkjet technology to eventually eat
into significant portions of offset production are far
greater for the mere fact that, based on the ability to
group printhead modules, the potential format-size of
this technology’s imaging area is limitless, in theory at
least. And so, somewhere along the way, inkjet technology also picked up the digital printing moniker.
This month, PrintAction provides an update of key
technological developments since drupa 2008 from the
industry’s four leading digital printing technology
providers, based on the assumption that ultimate success in the digital printing segment, which is perhaps
best defined as technology designed to capture offset
pages, will rely heavily upon the development of both
inkjet- and electrophotography-based technology. Presumably some of the other digital tech providers – perhaps best exemplified by Xeikon – are quite happy to sit
in their carved out niché. Currently, few would doubt
the might of HP under these inkjet and electro terms of
power, particular given its recent beta successes with the
30-inch Inkjet Web Press – once code named Tinker
Bell. While now far from fantasy, commercial printers
will ultimately determine if single-pass, high-end inkjet
production fulfills the promises once made by the toner
players that emerged from digital drupa.
