Jim Hamilton

With Canon’s announcement of the Océ VarioPrint 6000 Titan, it’s a good time to revisit the cut-sheet monochrome digital market.

I love print. I particularly love it when it knocks my socks off. I’m also a huge digital print advocate. Yet much of production color digital print is process color only. Cyan, magenta, yellow, and black are great, and they are perfect for a lot of work, but sometimes I yearn for more.

On Thursday May 11, around 150 Konica Minolta production print users gathered in Vienna for a day of presentations at the inaugural meeting of PROKOM, the Konica Minolta user community. With the focus, at least at first, on users of cut-sheet light to mid-production color and black-and-white digital print, the opportunity for PROKOM is unlike many other user groups, which tend to focus on higher levels of production.

InfoTrends defined the Zone of Disruption as an opportunity for products with price points below $1 million, speed faster than most electrophotographic cut-sheet color printers, very competitive running costs, and production-oriented features. A handful of products have appeared in the Zone of Disruption over the past few years and this week a new one joined the fray: Canon’s Océ VarioPrint i200.

After more than a year of public statements that Kodak’s Enterprise Inkjet division was for sale, the company has decided to keep it.

During the One Canon press/analyst event (March 7-9) in Boca Raton, Fla., Canon unveiled worldwide the Colorado 1640 and Mal Baboyian, Senior VP of Canon U.S.A.’s Business Imaging Solutions Group for Océ Product Marketing and Support, thinks it is Océ’s most important wide-format graphic arts product introduction in 25 years.

This is the seventh time that I have recorded a video blog review of all the corporate greeting cards I received during the holidays.

We were in Japan last month, and as luck would have it, we were there at the same time that Komori held an open house to showcase its newest digital print solutions. This international event took place at Komori’s facility in Tsukuba, Japan, and drew hundreds of attendees from all over the Asia Pacific region. It also provided the opportunity to showcase its Impremia IS29, a B2-format, sheetfed, UV inkjet printer.

Last week I went to Boca Raton, Fla., for the 2016 thINK Conference. The sessions that I attended were well done and thought provoking.

Graph Expo’s first visit to Orlando can be considered a qualified success.

Coming on the heels of drupa, Graph Expo will be a great opportunity to see some of the latest product announcements made at drupa.

I’d already been briefed on a lot of drupa 2016 news before I left home so I wasn’t really expecting much to surprise me. I was wrong.

After digesting a week of meetings at drupa 2016 along with plenty of good German food and beer, the InfoTrends analyst team believes the show can be characterized by five major themes. Those are Inkjet 3.0, Digital Printing of Packaging, B1 Digital, Special Effects and Industry 4.0.

I attended the recent Dscoop Americas event in San Antonio and was struck by a few trends, such as value-added special effects, digital laser cutting, PrintBeat (which will be the heart of PrintOS for HP Indigo users), the overlap of inkjet and electrophotography, and Print in 8 (the idea that print could be delivered anywhere in the world in eight hours).

The latest offering from thINK and Canon Solutions America is "The Inkjet Edge: How to Transition Your Business to Inkjet," a new book that will be a valuable tool for print service providers of all types. The book follows in the footsteps of "The Designer’s Guide to Inkjet," which was published last year. "The Inkjet Edge" takes a more business-oriented approach in an effort to help print service providers that are considering, or are in the midst of, an inkjet transition.