Digital Print Engine News from On Demand

With this being a Drupa year, most companies are saving their new product announcements for the world’s largest printing conference and will be releasing details over the next few months, just prior to the show in May/June. Given this situation there were just a few new product announcements for new print engines at On Demand this year.

On the color digital printing front Canon announced two new companion products to its hot new imagePRESS C7000VP.  Keeping with Canon tradition the new models are slower speed versions called the imagePRESS C6000VP and the imagePRESS C6000.  Both are 60 ppm digital color cutsheet devices and both have the same image quality as the original C7000VP.  Initial list prices are $155,000 and $99,800 respectively.

On display, but not available until this fall is the C900 from Ricoh. This new color digital printer will run at 90 ppm, even on heavy substrates (up to 300 gsm). While pricing is not official early indications are the price will be around $100,000 - making it very affordable.

New color digital product announcements will be forthcoming from HP, Xerox, and Xeikon over the next few weeks.

There is a buzz around the very high speed web-fed color devices. A market that Kodak Versamark used to have to themselves that has suddenly gotten crowded with entries from Xerox (the only toner based machine), InfoPrint Solutions, Océ and Screen.  Vendors are poised to capture new TransPromo and Direct Mail pages.

On the monochrome front, Canon introduced a new 135 ppm machine that is positioned to fit in between the 105 ppm light production device and the heavy duty cycle devices (Canon IR110, IR138, IR150).

Konica Minolta announced the Bizhub PRO™ 2500P, a 160 ppm single pass duplex printer, which is the Océ VP 6160 machine. It’s interesting to note that Océ sells the Konica Minolta C6500 digital color printer under its own label and now KM sells an Océ product under its label.

Comments

[Steve]

I wonder if it is too early yet to expect anything "Green" at DRUPA with respect to digital production.

We in the print industry are very aware of the shifting tide of opinon and actions.

You can bet each of these companies have somebody in the think tank trying to rationalize the current toner usage as somehow environmentally sound.

Kind of like the the duck on the pond cruising along while beneath the water he is paddling as fast as he can.