Pursue the Development Footprint of Digital Printing from Three Aspects (1)

For a long time, digital printing seems to carry many people's dreams about the development of the printing technology in the future. It has not been easy to stumble along the way. However, the pace of digital printing has never stopped. Since 1993, Indigo launched the world's first truly digital printer at the IPEX show, digital printing technology has made great progress in hardware, software and materials. As the drab exhibition for the development of printing technology, inkjet printing is the theme this year, and the wave of digital printing development is evident. The author will try to present the latest development of digital printing technology by introducing the development of digital printing technology in all aspects in the past year.

Equipment articles

At drupa2008, 64 exhibitors exhibited digital presses. The huge number of digital printing equipment vendors is visible. With the fierce market competition among various manufacturers, digital printing equipment can develop rapidly. Taking a look at the flagship products of major manufacturers, digital printing equipment has shown that the printing speed has been continuously improved and the printing quality has even exceeded or even surpassed the characteristics of offset printing.

Whenever, speed is always one of the focuses of people's attention. Compared with traditional offset printing, digital printing equipment will print much closer to offset than the offset, and its speed will be much lower than that of offset printing. For digital printing equipment manufacturers, it is the only way for digital printing to challenge offset printing and improve the speed of high-precision color printing in digital printing systems. Digital printing, on the premise of guaranteeing the printing quality, increases the printing speed. At present, there are two significant development directions, namely the improvement of the printing engine and the increase of the printing format.

1. Engine Improvement

Kodak's Stream concept machine gives us unlimited imagination about high-speed digital printing systems. This concept machine can print the print quality of the current Kodak digital color press in a 44cm wide rotary system, but the speed is significantly increased, up to 2500 pages per minute, and the applicable media range is more extensive. An image quality analysis report completed by SpencerLAB, an independent digital imaging test company, states that the Kodak Stream concept printer can achieve an offset quality equivalent to 175 lines per inch, and the Stream concept proof has a color gamut that is larger than the 175 line/inch proof proof. The % and black density is 29% higher than the offset proofs. This Kodak devoted four-year continuous inkjet printer has greatly replaced the momentum of offset printing, the traditional offset printing equipment manufacturers may have smelled the breath of competition.

In order to increase the printing speed, digital printing equipment manufacturers have improved their printing engines and upgraded their original products. Taking HP as an example, the company will introduce a new Indigo 7000 press with a maximum speed of 240 pages per minute. Its 812-point/inch, 8-bit/pixel recording head can process 775 M pixels per second. Xerox's new iGen4 is also known as the "highest-production single-sheet digital press with the highest printing quality in the printing industry." Compared to its predecessor, iGen3, its production capacity has increased by 25% to 35%, and Can produce offset and photo quality images and continuous colors, running at up to 110 pages/minute.

In addition, Xerox Concept Color 220, Xerox’s concept machine, achieves twice the output speed of the iGen3 digital press by integrating two digital presses together. The main high-speed web digital presses on the market today are HP Indigo 7000, HP Indigo W7200, NexPresss 3600, OceJetStream 2200, Xeikon 8000, InfoPrint 5000, Versamark VL2000, and others.

2. Wide-format digital printing machine

Referred to a wide-format digital press, InkjetWebPress had to be mentioned. The 762mm web press is designed for newspapers, books, and direct mail markets, with a maximum print speed of 2,600 pages per minute. According to HP’s official announcement, the color printing cost of printing 30% full-page A4 paper on this machine is only US$0.01, and the cost for black and white printing is only US$0.0015. If this machine can be launched next year as scheduled, it will become the fastest and lowest cost digital press.

Although the application of inkjet technology has been quite mature in the field of large-format and super-large-format inkjet, in the field of wide-format digital printing, the progress of inkjet printing technology has shown a strong momentum of development in recent years. Thanks to advances in nozzle technology, more and more manufacturers are able to fabricate an array of nozzles with the same width as the press, so that one inkjet can cover the entire web without having to pass the paper several times through the nozzle. Greatly improved the speed of inkjet printing. At present, representative products of wide-format digital printers include JetPress 720 from Fujifilm, QPress from Jadason, and Truepress JetSX from Screen.

The TruepressJetSX is the world's first inkjet printer with cutting capabilities. The target market is the B2 format market, and inkjet technology can be used to achieve an offset press production speed of 1,600 sheets per hour. The JetPress720 is developed by Fujifilm's Dimatix and uses a full-width (720mm) printhead. The printhead consists of a high-density, long-life array of MEMS piezoelectric print elements. There are 4 different ink sizes in the inkjet process. Dropping, so a paper-feeding process can achieve 4 different print densities. Qpress is a surprise for us from Jadason, a Hong Kong-based equipment company. It is the world's first B2 format toner production digital press. Its maximum speed and resolution are 100A4 pages per minute and 1200dpi respectively. The main parameters of these 3 digital printing equipments are shown in Table 2.

From the basic parameters of the above three products, we can see that the width of the current wide-format sheet-fed digital press is mainly large-scale, and has a high printing speed and accuracy. The wide range also facilitates compatibility with traditional postpress equipment, preserves the original equipment investment results, and reduces investment costs.

Software articles

A few years ago, some experts pointed out that with the advancement of high-speed inkjet systems, speed and print quality are no longer the bottleneck that restricts the development of digital printing, but they support typesetting software, digital workflow software, and digital content creation software for high-speed digital printing systems. Whether it can meet the needs of the rapidly developing digital printing market will become a difficult point for future development.

1. Digital Printing Workflow

With the coexistence of printing services such as general printing and variable data printing, black and white printing, and color printing, single page printing, and on-demand publishing, the complexity of the workflow has increased geometrically. If there is no guarantee that the printing process will proceed smoothly, the advantages of digital printing will be greatly reduced. However, major digital printing equipment manufacturers have spared no effort to develop advanced hardware devices, and did not ignore the development of supporting process software. Such as HP's introduction of HP SmartStream digital printing process management system, Fuji Xerox's FreeFlow, Océ's PRISMA and so on.

The "Roll Over Gutenberg" book production process just displayed in drupa2008 has demonstrated that digital workflow is equally important for digital printing. Under the management of the OcePRISMAprepare process, OceVarioPrint6250 (black and white) and OceCS650Pro (color) two digital presses work closely with the front-end and back-end processes to complete the entire production process of Roll Over Gutenberg. The entire workflow is managed by the Oce PRISM Aprepare, which separates the black and white and color sections of the document and ensures that each page of data is sent correctly to 2 black and white or color digital printing devices.