Expanding Applications That Drive Inkjet Page Growth

The next phase of growth for digital color printing will be using inkjet to print offset-quality images on coated stocks, at reasonable costs. The target applications are direct mail, catalogs, collateral and magazines.

Digital color pages continue to grow nicely: up 15% in North America in 2016. Looking at the growth in more detail, one can readily see that the page volume growth is being driven by high-speed, continuous-feed color inkjet. Pages produced on webfed presses have been increasing at ~20% per year in recent years, double the rate of growth of cut-sheet pages, resulting in half of the total volume being inkjet output.

So what’s being printed on these production inkjet web presses? The common denominator is documents on uncoated stock and that don’t require high-quality images: transactional documents, direct mail letters and books. The economics of transactional printing and direct mail letter printing now favor white paper feeding a full-color inkjet web press versus preprinted forms with mono laser overprinting. And, for books, the focus is shifting from the print cost per book to the cost of books sold.

The next phase of growth for digital color printing is the use of inkjet technology to print offset-quality images on coated stocks, at reasonable costs. The target applications are direct mail, catalogs, collateral and magazines. This phase is just getting started. A number of vendors are offering continuous-feed presses for this market, including: Canon Océ ProStream; HP HDNA PageWide; Kodak Prosper; Ricoh VC60000; Screen Truepress Jet520HD; Xerox Trivor 2400.

I recently received a set of samples from Xerox highlighting the capabilities of the Trivor 2400. Xerox is touting its ability to print on standard offset stocks, with no pre-coat or primer. The samples consisted of direct mail letters, postcards, two- and four-page personalized direct mailers, personalized mini catalogs and hybrid catalogs (cover and eight-page insert produced on the Trivor 2400 and 28 pages produced offset)
more at:  http://www.piworld.com/article/expanding-applications-drive-inkjet-page-growth/

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