Digital Printing-Production Inkjet - Continuous Feed (Color)

Right around the turn of the millennium, Siddharth (Sid) and Adi Chinai—the father and son brain trust behind King Printing—decided to take their product to the Internet. The company now boasts a clientele list of more than 8,000, many of them small and independent publishers. Though adibooks.com may not have been the very first independent/self-publishing vehicle on the scene, it had plenty of company within a few years.

For the most part, coated and uncoated offset papers run reasonably well on toner-based digital systems but, with inkjet, it's a whole different ball game. Inkjet inks have a high water content, and tend to soak into uncoated papers or sit up on coated papers where they may smear.

As the new decade begins, InfoTrends focuses on the  status and prospect of color inkjet technology in the commercial printing industry. The current systems are successful in forms printing, book printing, direct mail, transactional and TransPromo applications.

If you believe the hopeful hype of equipment vendors and the prognostications of pundits, you might be inclined to think that high-speed inkjet presses are poised to irrevocably transform the printing industry and hasten most offset and digital presses to their next life as boat anchors.

NEW YORK—Vyomesh (VJ) Joshi, executive vice president of HP's $29 billion Imaging and Printing Group, received the 23rd annual Prism Award for distinguished leadership during a luncheon held here last Wednesday within the ornate Gotham Hall. The annual event raises scholarship money for New York University's Master of Arts in Graphic Communications Management and Technology program.

SOMERVILLE, MA—Ames On-Demand will be the first company in North America to install the Xerox 980 color continuous-feed printing system. Ames On-Demand prints textbooks, lab manuals and other books for higher education publishers. The company believes the toner-based Xerox 980 will significantly expand its textbook business, as well as enable Ames On-Demand to grow into new markets, including transpromotional documents.

PALO ALTO, CA—June 30, 2008—HP announced that its 2008 drupa trade show exhibit highlighting the company’s industry leadership, innovation and commitment to customer success, was the most successful drupa exhibit in HP’s history. Purchase contracts completed at the 14-day show were led by a significant number of HP Indigo digital press deals, in addition to sales of HP Scitex and HP Designjet large-format solutions as well as HP SmartStream workflow systems. Drupa, which was held in Düsseldorf, Germany from May 29-June 11, is the world’s largest graphic arts exposition; the HP stand at drupa featured the industry’s largest digital color portfolio and was the