InfoTrends Forecast: Inkjet Targets Commercial
As the new decade begins, InfoTrends focuses on the status and prospect of color inkjet technology in the commercial printing industry. In the current market, seven companies (Agfa, HP, InfoPrint Solutions, Kodak, Miyakoshi, Océ and Screen) now offer high-volume, continuous-feed color inkjet systems. Fujifilm and Xerox have also publicized plans to offer their own products.
The current systems are successful in forms printing, book printing, direct mail, transactional and TransPromo applications. Nevertheless, most pages are produced in the general commercial printing market—and color inkjet, as a printing technology, is barely existent here.
Inkjet is not a single technology. In fact, it is the most varied printing technology in terms of sub- categories available. In some cases, these are just several approaches to meet the same goal, but in many ways the technology choice has practical implications on the viability of certain applications.
Figure 1 cuts the different technologies into two main groups, namely Continuous Inkjet (CIJ) and Drop-on-Demand (DOD). It further cuts these two categories by type of drop ejection, carrier fluid and colorant. As outlined below, there are far more technology variants available in drop-on-demand than in continuous inkjet. Please note that the "Other" category under DOD includes technologies that are not relevant today or in the near future for the graphic arts market, but may eventually play a role.
Over the next few years, color electrophotographic (EP) systems will remain the dominant color digital technology in commercial printing due to their higher image quality and greater media range. Nevertheless, the maturity and speed constraints of electrophotographic technology make color inkjet a brighter prospect for the commercial printing market in the long term.
As noted earlier, inkjet as a printing technology is not widely used in the area where most pages are produced (e.g., commercial printing). Nevertheless, this market structure is beginning to change. Several technology developments have enabled the use of inkjet for high-volume commercial printing as a primary process:
Inkjet Arrays: Page-wide1 inkjet arrays have been a prerequisite for inkjet to enter color graphics printing with sufficient speeds. Before their introduction, inkjet systems capable of sufficient print quality levels had to use scanning (i.e., moving) inkjet heads, which intermittently print a swath and then forward the media a small distance. These setups did not allow for the high print speeds required in general commercial printing.
A page-wide printhead, on the other hand, is stationary and the substrate is moved beneath it. There is no start-stop action required. Additionally, page-wide arrays provide a simplicity in design that is not available with the scanning inkjet heads that are used in home, low-end office and large-format printers. Accordingly, page-wide arrays have been the focus of design and experimentation for many years, and 2008 and 2009 have seen important introductions based on such arrays.
Other Technology Advances: Other manufacturing advances are also relevant, and some have proven themselves in the applications where inkjet is well-established.
For example, wide-format inkjet has several different ink types that offer new capabilities, such as the ability to digitally print metallic effects and the ability to print using white ink in high-resolution graphic applications. Even magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) materials are now jettable, as seen in products from InfoPrint Solutions, Kodak, Océ and RISO.
Developments of inks for commercial printing concentrated on improving ink properties to reduce the frequency of nozzle failure while improving the drying process. Drying in high-speed inkjet becomes a critical property due to the short time the ink has to be dried in a high-speed press.
New developments allow a primer to be added to the paper prior to the main print stations as a flood coat, or as something to be jetted on the image areas only. Two other examples of relevant advances in manufacturing are in the control electronics that drive the inkjet heads and the digital front ends (DFEs) providing the print image. As the new high-speed devices rely a lot on variable data applications, the digital front end has to stream variable printing images at full rated speed.
Cost Implications: The cost of digital printing, particularly color digital printing, has been a limiting factor to its broad adoption. Nevertheless, there has a been an ongoing drop in the cost, and InfoTrends expects this trend to continue for color toner products, and possibly to be driven even lower for high-speed, continuous-feed, color inkjet products.
The above Figure 2 outlines InfoTrends' view of current application areas and the long-term future for inkjet technology.
Offset Replacement, the faintest bar at the top of the figure, is the final focus of most inkjet developments in commercial printing. While black & white electrophotographic printing is already quite competitive with offset for run lengths up to several thousand, most commercial printing is done in color, and offset still is responsible for the largest share of production printing pages. Accordingly, this is the biggest market growth opportunity.
Electrophotographic color systems have been targeting the offset market since their introduction in 1995, but these devices have been confined to low-run niches unless variable data printing was necessary. The cost base of these systems has improved considerably over the years and, with further falling running costs, the economic run lengths of a digital printer increase rapidly because of the expanded number of addressable applications.
High-Volume Transactional devices are targeted toward high throughput and variable data, and less on graphic quality. Increasingly, printers in this product range are used for TransPromo communications, where color is almost a prerequisite. Although this application has experienced strong growth over the past two years, its volume is ultimately limited as substitution potential is determined by the number of statements printed (about 120 billion impressions in Western Europe in 2007).
Transactional and transpromotional print is under strong pressure from electronic substitution, which means the potential number of installations and print volume purely for TransPromo and related print operates under the same constraints. There is the volume associated with inserts, however, which will likely become "onserts" in TransPromo documents in the future.
Mid-Volume Color devices (monthly duty cycle from 100k to 1 million impressions) using inkjet are an odd case because RISO is currently the only supplier of inkjet color equipment in this category. This category covers the lower-volume environments for production color printing, and products in this class are found in a great number of printing establishments, such as commercial printers and in non-traditional print environments (e.g., in-plants, copy shops, mail houses).
It is unclear at this point what vendor or vendors will join RISO as suppliers of inkjet to this category, but InfoTrends expects that one or more suppliers will do so in the next five years. In fairness, to enter the mid-volume market, a supplier of inkjet for SOHO (Small Office/Home Office) will need to address much different distribution and service requirements.
A gap is there in terms of inkjet entrants, but this also means there is an opportunity. Regardless, there is stiff competition from existing electrophotographic printers and the intrinsic advantages of inkjet (like a simpler imaging unit, lower consumable costs and very high speeds) have less of an impact in lower-volume environments, while the versatility and the tried-and-tested design of the electrophotographic printers and MFPs are strong points for the incumbents.
SOHO use of inkjet is long-established, with hundreds of millions of drop-on-demand printers having been placed during the past 20 years. Most of these devices are thermal inkjet-based, but piezo technologies are also available.
The long-term goal is for inkjet to compete against offset in terms of speed and print quality. Inkjet technology observers should not judge the field's first steps toward the long-term goal of offset replacement too harshly. Too much money has been invested by too many companies for inkjet to fail.
Furthermore, InfoTrends estimates that high-volume inkjet placements will increase at more than 35 percent per year over the next five years, outperforming placements within the electrophotographic market by a factor of three. In addition, color print volume is expected to nearly quadruple by 2013.
Not unlike the early days of the high-speed electrophotographic market, inkjet will advance through the co-development of enabling products and processes with stakeholders, such as printing companies, substrate manufacturers, finishing system vendors and even end customers. Some participants will inevitably drop out, especially as the field of competitors expands.
InfoTrends believes that the companies that have already committed so much to achieve the long-term goal will ultimately drive inkjet's success in the commercial printing market. PI
Footnote: 1 "Page-wide" usually refers to a single imaging head or a set of fixed and adjusted inkjet heads spanning the full imaging width of the final output format. In certain cases, an A4/letter size-wide head is used, which can be moved sideways to print A3/legal width. Still, this is usually referred to as page-wide inkjet head. Broadly speaking, a page-wide head has at least the width of an A4 or letter size sheet.
About the Authors
The content for this article has been excerpted from InfoTrends' document entitled "Inkjet in Commercial Print: A Map for the Coming Decade," which was authored by Tim Greene, Jim Hamilton, Bob Leahey and Ralf Schlözer. To learn more about the full report (which includes 30 pages of in-depth text, tables and charts), visit http://store.infotrendsresearch.com/product_p/105367.htm or e-mail Robyn Wuori at robyn_wuori@infotrends.com.
