DRUPA 2004 HIGHLIGHTS
Part 2 - Technology-Based Opportunities for Forms Suppliers
by Ivars Sarkans

Editor's Note: This is part two of a two-part article on observations at Drupa 2004. Part one covered new technology highlights and indications of major printing industry trends. Part two focuses specifically on some of the technology and systems exhibits at DRUPA 2004 that represent new opportunities and challenges for business document (including forms) industry participants. DRUPA stands for “Druck und Papier” – printing and paper technology show held once every four years in Düsseldorf, Germany.

Forms suppliers with over 8,000 field sales representatives, plus several catalog, telephone and Internet sales programs, represent one of the major distribution channels in the printing industry. Forms industry participants should be moving much faster than in the past to take advantage of new business opportunities based on technological advances in all types of printing, finishing and related systems. One of the indications that forms suppliers have not been aggressive enough in taking advantage of new technologies and market shifts is the sizeable population of new document factories. Many mailing houses and service organizations have started printing operations and have captured work that was previously done in forms and commercial printing plants. As evidenced by Drupa 2004, technology continues to provide an abundance of new product and service opportunities, especially for printing industry participants with access to a large number of printed product buyers and users.

The equipment that should be of particular interest to forms producers includes compact highly automated offset presses, with sheet size capability in the 13” x 18” to 14” x 20” range. These are usually classified as “2-up” of 2-page presses because they print two 8-½” x 11” pages side-by-side in one pass. Some of these presses feature automatic plate changing, color consistency control provisions, automatic blanket washers and on-press plate imaging. For forms producers who want to enter the large short run color market, these “push-button” presses offer the advantages of modest skill requirements and quick startup of commercial printing production. The presses with on-board platemaking, called Direct Imaging (DI) presses, even offer a major part of the necessary digital prepress workflow for short run color printing built into the press. This can help to overcome one of the major barriers that forms producers with limited prepress capabilities face when trying to expand into commercial printing.

Chart 1 presents a sampling of specialized short run color presses at Drupa 2004. Most of these presses use the waterless offset printing method to eliminate the variations and skill requirements related to dampening. These presses require special waterless offset plates. The KBA Karat 74 and Genius models use a very simple and compact ink train which meters ink with an engraved cylinder (anilox roll) and needs only one plate-size form roller. KBA claims that this ink train design avoids ghosting and insures good image quality as long as plates are made correctly. Both KBA models are available with UV dryers and produced some unusual products in Drupa 2004 demonstrations. The KBA Karat 74 is a larger sheet size press than the other short run machines listed in Chart 1, but it was included because of special capabilities. The 74 Karat can print on films, foils and papers as light as 16 lbs., and also on plastics and carton board up to .02” thick. One of the Karat 74 demonstrations included use of special software with the press to produce 3-dimensional images, similar to lenticular printing, on plastic and foil materials.

The KBA Genius is a very compact central impression cylinder 5-color press and Drupa 2004 demonstrations included printing with UV inks on thick sheets of plastic materials and folding carton board. A somewhat similar press configuration was introduced by Shinohara as the 52uno model. The 52uno has an anilox ink metering cylinder and one form roller, but this is a 4 color wet offset press. Shinohara promotes printing on plastics, folding carton board and light papers as one of the advantages of the large central impression cylinder. Both the KBA Genius and Shinohara 52uno use metal plates imaged in a separate operation, but plate changing on the press is partially automated.

Some of the short run DI presses that have been displayed at previous shows were at Drupa 2004 in improved versions. The Ryobi 3404DI, also sold as KBA 46 Karat and KPG 5634DI, has new Presstek ProFive Exel imaging heads with 16 micron minimum spot size capable of 300 lpi resolution. The Heidelberg Quickmaster DI-46-4 Pro has similar improvements. These presses are compatible with most high resolution stochastic and hybrid screening methods. The Adast 557DI is a conventional 4 or 5 tower design with the advantages of a 4 over 1 color perfecting option and the latest high-resolution on-press plate imaging units.

Digital Printing
Digital document printing demonstrations at Drupa 2004 showed that equipment suppliers are targeting three distinct production environments:

Each of these digital printing segments provides opportunities for forms suppliers who already sell large quantities of short run printing and transaction documents. Forms suppliers have also been successful in efforts to shift volume from some in-plant facilities to their plants. Overall, forms producers have not participated in the rapid growth of digital printing to the extent that their market access should have made it possible. As a result, forms producers now face competition from a large population of digital printing specialists who produce forms or products very similar to forms.

At Drupa 2004, a large number of digital printing demonstrations included production of statements, invoices, checks, other transaction documents and direct mail. As shown in Chart 2, some of the latest black toner and color digital presses operate at relatively high speeds and are in fact a new generation of forms and direct mail presses. Forms producers clearly face a choice of following the forms migration to digital presses or continuing to give up their share of the business document market.

Most of the sheetfed black toner digital presses listed in Chart 2 have a magnetic toner option and are used in high-volume check printing operations. The normal toner of Nipson magnetographic web presses is suitable for MICR encoding, and Oce offers a MICR toner option on their web-fed machines. The sheetfed black toner machines from Kodak and the new Nuvera models from Xerox can print on coated paper in commercial printing applications. The web-fed single print unit monochrome presses from Nipson, Oce and Xerox can be installed in a twin engine configuration with turn bars between the print units for high speed duplex printing of books, manuals, directories and documents. The new Oce VarioStream 9000 models and Delphax digital presses have two built-in printing stations for duplexing as a normal configuration.

The Nipson VaryPress models are particularly well suited for printing labels, films and forms with affixed or integrated cards, labels and sheets. These machines tolerate uneven web surfaces and their flash fusing does not heat the web, which can create problems with label adhesives and distortion of films and other materials. For low volume or entry level application, the Oce VarioStream 6100 also has flash fusing and can be equipped for web feeding from packs or rolls.

Among the color digital document presses on Chart 2, the Kodak Versamark models are in a class by themselves in terms of speed. While these ink jet printers do not match the image quality from some of the sheetfed digital presses, the latest Versamark color machines should be well suited for direct mail and forms production, similar to the applications already served in a sizeable number of installations. For modest volume full color document production at very low cost, the Riso HC5000 ink jet printer introduced at Drupa 2004 could become a very attractive machine. While current image resolution is rated at 600 dpi, the samples available at Drupa 2004 had the appearance of 300 dpi printing at best. Riso representatives indicated that the quality will be better and suitable for forms when the HC 5000 becomes commercially available.

One of the innovations on the Kodak NexPress 2100 was a special clear toner which is applied in the fifth print station. The sheets are then fed through on off line finishing machine to create a very high gloss finish without the need for an overlaminate. Xerox indicated that a gloss varnish option will also be available for the IGen 3 press. Agfa Dotrix “the.factory” was significant in terms of showing that ink jet heads can apply UV curable inks at relatively high speeds, and one of the targeted applications for this press is security printing.

Drupa 2004 gave a strong indication that digital printing will continue to be a high growth market segment. New equipment is faster and more versatile and offers opportunities to innovative forms suppliers in commercial printing, document production and reclaiming some of the forms volume lost to service bureau, mailing and other new document factory operations.

Specialty Products and Services
Technology presentations at Drupa 2004 indicated that several ink and equipment suppliers are working on methods for printing RFID tag components, including the microchips, but there were no actual demonstrations. Several suppliers showed improved machines for assembling, testing and encoding RFID tags and labels. Van den Bergh Engineering demonstrated a new economical entry-level RFID tag system, the iLi-250, which is a modified integrated card and label machine. The iLi-250 includes stations for inspecting the RFID circuits before and after lamination, removal of defective tags, lamination, and die cutting to finish the products.

For cut sheet laser printer forms with integrated cards and labels, Van den Bergh Engineering demonstrated a new sheetfed machine which could be attractive to commercial printers as well as forms producers. The machine name, Docufinish, implies versatility and Van Den Bergh Engineering indicates that it can be used to apply labels, booklets, holographic films, flexible cards, clear plastic labels, magnetic foils and patches to sheets up to 12.5” x 19.5”. The Docufinish can perforate, score and die cut to form finished products. Rated speed is 12,000 letter-size sheets per hour.

Another specialty are at Drupa 2004 was application of security features to documents, such as invisible text and codes, holographic foil stripes and foil patches. Dimuken demonstrated both web-fed and sheetfed hologram applicators. These types of short to medium run length applicators were also shown by Van Den Bergh Engineering. For high volume applications, Newmec demonstrated a wide-web machine with 8 foil strip feeding stations.

Many of the specialties demonstrated at the show were innovative plastic and carton board items printed on some of the new short run offset presses and digital printers listed in Chart 1 and Chart 2. Large-format digital printing of signs, posters, banners, wallpaper, laminates and other decorative materials was a very visible specialty at Drupa 2004, with numerous exhibits ranging from UV ink jets to massive flatbed machines. The range of opportunities in printing specialties evident at a show like Drupa is so vast that only a few highlights can be covered in a brief article. This was also true of the print-related service potential in both pre-press and post-press capabilities that can be added to printing plants. New software makes it easier for printers to offer image library services, database management, project coordination and creative services. Drupa 2004 had an abundance of equipment and software for mailing, fulfillment, wrapping, laminating and other post-press services. Even short run offset-printed color and digital printing should be treated as part of pre and post-press service “packages”, rather than separate ink-on-paper operations to capture all of the value-added that can be accessed by printed product suppliers.

Ivars Sarkans is president of consulting firm Sarkans & Associates of Los Angeles, California and a long time contributor to DMIA publications. He can be reached by telephone at (323) 221-7791 or by e-mail at isarkans@sarkans.com.

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