WhatTheyThink Issue 6: The Production Print Issue

Issue Six 2023

Production Print

inkjet shopping guide FOR PRODUCTION PRESSES Entry-level presses The market of production inkjet devices is in constant flux. This can make selecting the right inkjet press a bewildering adventure. This guide aims at providing an overview of the main inkjet presses available for commercial and documentoriented applications.

The Big Rigs When we talk about the big rigs, these are the largest, fastest, presses and command the highest investment cost in the stable of inkjet presses. They are so large that you do not see them at many shows, and vendors are likely to take you to one of their dedicated demonstration centers or to a customer location to see working presses.

Crossover Presses For those shopping for a new press, or considering an upgrade, an understanding of your target markets is a key factor. There is a lot of middle ground between extremes, and that’s where our selection of “crossover presses” shine.

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PRINT BEYOND LIMITS. 877-623-4969 | PPS.CSA.CANON.COM Canon is a registered trademark of Canon Inc. in the United States and elsewhere. ProStream is a trademark or registered trademark of Canon Production Printing Netherlands B.V. All other referenced product names and marks are trademarks of their respective owners and are hereby acknowledged. ©2023 Canon Solutions America, Inc. All rights reserved.

The team CEO

Thayer Long

Chief Technology Officer

president Eric Vessels

Adam Dewitz

Senior Vice president, content & programs Julie Shaffer

Production Editor, content development

production editor, multimedia Development

Managing Editor

Senior Editor

Senior Editor David Zwang

client engagement & project coordinator

contributors

account executive

Amy Noble

Cary Sherburne

account executive Stephanie Papp

Jessica Taylor

Terry Clayton Elizabeth Gooding Patrick Henry Steve Johnson

Ryan McAbee Pat McGrew Ralf Schlözer Heidi Tolliver-Walker

Richard Romano

Debbie Papineau Adam Goldman

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Fine print WhatTheyThink is the global printing industry’s go-to information source with both print and digital offerings, including WhatTheyThink.com, WhatTheyThink Email Newsletters, and the WhatTheyThink magazine. Our mission is to inform, educate, and inspire the industry. We provide cogent news and analysis about trends, technologies, operations, and events in all the markets that comprise today’s printing and sign industries including commercial, in-plant, mailing, finishing, sign, display, textile, industrial, finishing, labels, packaging, marketing technology, software and workflow.

WhatTheyThink (ISSN 2642-3189) (USPS 500-850) Volume 46, Number 6 is published six times per year in January/February, March/April, May/June, July/August, September/October, November/December by WTT Media, Inc., at 2038 Ford Parkway #218, Saint Paul, MN 55116. Periodicals postage paid at Saint Paul, MN and additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send address changes to WhatTheyThink, 2038 Ford Parkway #218, Saint Paul, MN 55116. Subscriptions: Individual subscriptions are available without charge in the U.S. to qualified subscribers.

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Production print Welcome to the Production Print Issue.

Our final issue of the year takes a look at the status of the major production print technologies. How have equipment manufacturers been responding to changes and trends in the industry to help customers address top-of-mind issues like staffing challenges and sustainability? How are equipment portfolios expanding to help different print businesses adopt the latest printing technologies?

First off, Elizabeth Gooding looks at the current state of production inkjet, perhaps the most dynamic of the printing technologies, focusing on the latest production inkjet models.

Inkjet seems to be where the action is, but don’t count toner out. Ralf Schlözer points out that electrophotography (EP) “still shines brightly,” especially in the light- and mid-production markets where EP technology still offers the by far biggest choice and has the biggest appeal.

And let’s not forget about offset which, despite all the interest in digital, is not going anywhere. Patrick Henry rounds up offset press installations in North America in 2023, gaining insight into what printers are looking for in terms of format size, press configuration, UV curing and press automation.

Our regular “Tales from the Database” feature looks at what 10 years’ worth of survey data can tell us about press technology investment trends.

Contributor Terry Clayton takes a deep dive into current trends in inks and coatings, highlighting some exciting new products hitting the market.

“Automation” has become the industry watchword, and while automation can mean many things to different people, in this issue we look at the hardware side of automation—namely, robotics. Long established in wide format and even packaging, do robots have a place in commercial print workflows?

Heidi Tolliver-Walker takes a close look at sustainability in the printing industry— specifically, how much impact do printing businesses and the process of printing itself impact the planet? What’s our carbon footprint, and what are some simple things we can do to reduce it?

Cary Sherburne tells some inspiring stories from the world of on-demand textiles and how a changing business and production model can help address the textile and apparel industry’s poor track record on sustainability.

And we feature an Executive Q&A with issue sponsor Canon, looking at how they are addressing the changing needs to today’s print businesses.

All that and more in the Production Print Issue.

The Production Print Issue

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18

10

26

30 welcome Watch Your Step

By Heidi Tolliver-Walker

tales from the database

By Richard Romano

production inkjet

By Elizabeth Gooding

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Here come the robots

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Shining Bright

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outside the box

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offset news

By Richard Romano

By Ralf Schlözer

By Cary Sherburne

By Patrick Henry

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36 executive Q&A

By WhatTheyThink

A Tangled Web

By Pat McGrew & Ryan McAlbee

Kyocera Sponsored Content

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fast tracking fashion

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Johnson’s World

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marketplace

By Cary Sherburne

By Steve Johnson

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your

Watch

step Does our industry have a carbon footprint problem?

By Heidi Tolliver-Walker

At home, we recycle and turn out the lights when we leave the room. We buy hybrid vehicles and some of us even bike to work. We do our part to conserve resources and minimize our impact on the planet. But what about at work? How much impact do printing businesses, and the process of printing itself, impact the planet? How much collective responsibility do we bear?

What’s our impact?

Before answering this question, it’s important to step back and look at the larger context. That starts with the country we live in. The United States has an out-sized impact on the environment. With only 4.5% of the world’s population, we generate 15.6% of the world’s carbon footprint.

Why this outsized impact? We are a highly industrialized economy, with a significant focus on manufacturing, energy production and transportation sectors. Our reliance on fossil fuels, such as coal, oil and natural gas, to meet the energy demands of industries and transportation leads to substantial greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, our level of industrialization has its upsides and downsides, too.

Because the majority of our carbon footprint comes from the impact of fossil fuels, the U.S.’s out-

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sized impact presents an outsized opportunity to do better.

Energy sources are one of the factors over which we have significant control. By switching from fossil fuels to renewable sources, we can make up lost carbon footprint “ground” very quickly.

How does the United States compare to other countries when it comes to renewable energy? On average, 17% of countries’ energy comes from renewable sources. In the United States, it is only 10.7%. On the list of countries with the highest percentage of renewable energy use, the United States isn’t even in in the top 10.

This is one area where the printing industry can lead the way.

Which sectors have the highest footprint?

How much impact can we have? As in any country, not every sector of the economy has the same environmental impact. In the United States, the sector with the largest carbon footprint is transportation. This is followed by electric power. Industry, in which commercial printing would be included, owns 23% of the emissions. So here in the commercial printing industry, we have an opportunity to make an impact on nearly one-quarter of the emissions that come from industry overall.

What’s the carbon footprint of print and mail?

Calculating what that impact is, exactly, is tricky since every print shop’s impact will be wildly different. But to give a general idea, Carbon Quota, a UK-based company that helps businesses lower their carbon footprints, did the following calculation for one of its customers: An A4 96-page, litho-printed color brochure with a four-page cover, with a run of 20,000 copies and a delivery distance of 129km creates a total carbon

China 27.7% Rest of the World 33.9%

SHARE OF THE WORLD’S CARBON FOOTPRINT Source: Global Footprint Network

United States 15.9%

Republic of Korea 1.7% Germany 2.3% Russian Federation India 6.4% 4.7%

footprint of just over 20 tonnes (CO2e). This is equal to boiling a kettle 2.8 million times or flying over four times around the world in economy class.

On a smaller scale, Canada’s Prime Data, whose goal is to be the first carbon-neutral direct mail house in the world, calculated the total carbon emissions of each direct mail piece it sends at 205g per piece. This includes the emissions generated from forestry, paper production, employee commutes, printing, distribution and end-of-life processing.

Where is this carbon footprint coming from?

Through its research, Prime Data found that 85% of the carbon footprint of its direct mail pieces results from paper production and disposal.

The second largest contributor is mail delivery through Canada Post. The third largest contributor is its own internal operations, of which heating and cooling is the largest percentage.

Steps to Bringing Down the Footprint In this, Prime Data provides a blueprint to its peers. Assuming most print shops have a broadly similar structure, this gives the industry areas to target, as well. So what steps does Prime Data take to bring down its footprint?

• It asks more questions of paper suppliers and takes into consideration a paper’s carbon footprint as part of its vendor selection process.

• Encourages its trucking company to invest in electric vehicles (or, for printers with their own fleets, purchase electric or hybrid vehicles).

• Reduces the weight of the mail it sends. (This includes introducing the EZ Donor Mailer, which eliminates the outer envelope.)

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Source: WiseVoter.com

•

Because Prime Data determined that it had a huge heating-cooling loss around its dock areas during loading and unloading, it has added heavy-duty energy curtains to minimize as much heating and cooling loss as possible.

Reduces the carbon footprint of its employee commutes by encouraging

for improvement. These might include adding insulation, sealing leaks, improving the efficiency of heating systems (including adding programmable thermostats) and similar measures.

There are many areas in a print shop—both on the production floor and elsewhere— where simple steps can make a difference.

For our industry, our biggest opportu-

remote and hybrid work where applicable.

• Offsets any additional emissions—in this case, through the Great Bear Rainforest Carbon Offset project in British Columbia.

In addition to these areas of production modeled by Prime Data, printers can take steps in the non-production areas, as well. These start with doing an energy audit to identify areas where energy is being wasted and opportunities

nities can be found in paper selection, energy use (primarily heating and cooling) and transportation.

Knowing these sources of carbon emissions is an important first step, because it points printers to areas to get started. This is encouraging because, while there are many aspects of climate destruction that our industry cannot inherently change, there are some very practical, easily accessible areas where we can.

•

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Source: US EPA

Source: Prime Data

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tales from the

database

By Richard Romano

Drawing on seven years’ worth of Print Business Outlook surveys, our “Tales from the Database” series looks at historical data to see if we can glean any particular hardware, software or

a broad cross-section of print businesses about business conditions, business challenges, new business opportunities and planned investments.

In our Printing Outlook reports, we tend to fo-

business trends. This issue, we turn our attention to printing technologies.

These surveys form the basis of our annual Printing Outlook reports, the most recent of which (2024) is currently in development and should be available in January 2024. In every survey, we ask

cus (obviously) on the most recent survey data, occasionally looking back a survey or two to see how these items have changed in the short term.

Plumbing the depths of our survey database can give us a better sense of how these trends have changed since the mid-2010s.

New Business Opportunities

“Adding high-speed production inkjet printing equipment (like HP PageWide, Canon Océ ColorStream/ImageStream)”: 16% “Adding toner-based digital printing equipment (like HP Indigo, Xerox iGen)”: 12% We don’t like to ask sad questions, but sometimes we must. To what extent do print businesses see “disposing of offset equipment to concentrate on digital printing” as an opportunity? As Figure 2 shows, this opportunity only peaked at 10% in 2017 (although we suspect it would have been a lot higher in the previous decade). So it looks like whatever offset-to-digital transformation is taking place has already taken place.

And for those playing along at home, in fall 2022 we added “replacing toner-based digital equipment with production inkjet” as a business opportunity, and it came in at 13%. This is another data point that we suspect was higher a few years ago, but we’ll have to see where this comes in when we get our fall 2023 data.

Over the past decade, we have tweaked our survey question(s) specific to printing technologies as they have evolved, so it’s not always possible to get a clear trend line.

Let’s look at some basic opportunities (see Figure 1).

“Adding additional offset equipment” has always been an under-5% business opportunity, although, interestingly, it spiked at 7% in fall 2022 (primarily among 20+-employee shops). This could just be a statistical anomaly, it could reflect businesses adding capacity to handle more offset work that rebounded post-pandemic, or it could be part of the effort to diversify into new applications. We’ll pay attention to this when our fall 2023 survey data comes in.

Still, offset is easily overshadowed by “adding digital printing equipment” as a business opportunity, which has generally been a 15%+ opportunity. However, “digital printing equipment” is not just one thing, so in 2022, we split out the two primary categories of digital printing equipment:

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Figure 1: “Adding additional offset equipment” and “adding digital printing equipment” as new business opportunities.

Source: WhatTheyThink Printing Outlook Surveys, 2016–2022.

Figure 2: “Disposing of offset equipment to concentrate on digital printing” as a new business opportunity.

Source: WhatTheyThink Printing Outlook Surveys, 2016–2022.

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Planned Investments These are perceived new business opportunities. What are print businesses actually buying? As Figure 3 shows, toner is still holding its own, with 2021 and 2022 seeing all-time high investment plans in a toner-based press. However, these last two years have also seen all-time high investment plans for production inkjet—which hit 13% last fall. And the sheetfed offset opportunity we saw a while ago was no fluke: even that hit a high of 7% in 2022. (Ah, but pity poor web offset: in this same period it never rose above 1%.)

By the way, we say “toner,” but “electrophotography” would be more accurate, as the HP Indigo doesn’t use “toner” per se, but is grouped in this equipment class.

In our fall 2023 survey that is currently in the field, we asked more granular questions about specific configurations of digital press, so it will be interesting to see how those shake out.

At the End of the Day So far, we’re not all that prepared to say that new printing technologies are necessarily replacement technologies—although we know anecdotally that for some print businesses they are.

But in general, they seem more complementary, as a diverse fleet enables print businesses to take on different kinds of jobs, something that is becoming increasingly necessary.

Figure 3: Planned investment in various press technologies.

Source: WhatTheyThink Printing Outlook Surveys, 2017–2022.

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Brilliant products and services for brilliant flexographic print results and business success.

WHAT’S YOUR OUTLOOK?

HOW DID YOUR BUSINESS FARE IN 2023?

By taking our survey, you provide invaluable information and insight for our annual Business Outlook Report.

The production inkjet puzzle

We introduce you to the latest production inkjet models serving the documentoriented, production inkjet segment.

By Elizabeth Gooding

Ten years ago, the term production inkjet was intended to distinguish high-speed, single-pass inkjet presses from desktop, departmental and wide-format inkjet devices. Not stated was that production inkjet was primarily used to produce documents like customer communications, books and direct mail with a bit of signage if you had a B2 sheetfed press.

Flash forward and high-speed, single-pass inkjet is producing packaging, textiles and other industrial applications typically assigned their own inkjet categories. The production inkjet category continues, accurately or not, to refer to document-related applications.

“We define [production inkjet] strictly as document printing,” said Marco Boer of I.T. Strategies.

“We keep all the other market separate.”

He cited 13 subcategories of inkjet printing with total OEM revenues for hardware ink and service estimated at $16.3 billion in 2022 and growing to $24.5 billion by 2028. Of that total revenue, about 14% relates to production inkjet with a projected 13% compound annual growth rate bringing revenues to $4.7 billion and 19% of the total inkjet OEM revenues.

Tim Green of IDC also said that their “IDC MarketScape for High-Speed Inkjet” sets a strict definition around the document segment to avoid confusion.

“Certain high-speed inkjet machines simply should not be compared to others, as one may

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not be an appropriate replacement for, or alternative to, the other,” Green said. “I think looking at a press like the Xerox Baltoro and comparing it to a press like the HP C500 is like comparing a Honda Civic to a Ford F-250—both are vehicles/highspeed inkjet-based presses, but they’re made for different things.”

While printing companies might consider branching out from the document space into aspects of packaging, it is not reasonable to compare a B3 sheetfed press serving the document market to one that prints on corrugated media of 98 inches in length.

Even when limiting the production inkjet discussion to the document market, the capabilities and formats of the presses under this umbrella have expanded dramatically with varying widths of continuous-feed presses as well as several different sheetfed formats. Applications confidently span from monochrome and color customer communications to photo-quality graphic arts production, with some presses nudging into the lanes for signage and even some types of packaging.

This article will focus on the latest production inkjet models, including new press introductions from 2023, and products announced previously that became commercially available or had their first installations this year.

The Latest Roll-fed Inkjet Press Launches Table 1 PRES S

P R IN T H EA DS

R ES O L U T I ON

TOP CMYK PRODUCTIVITY

Canon ProStream 3000

Kyocera piezoelectric drop-on-demand

Up to 1200 x 1200 dpi, 1200 x 720 dpi (at top speed)

436 feet per min.

1,902 IPM

HP PageWide Advantage 2200

HP B62 HDNA Thermal dual drop weight

2400 x 2400 including up to 8x nozzle redundancy

500 feet per min.

1600 IPM

KODAK PROSPER ULTRA 520 HD

Kodak ULTRASTREAM Continuous Inkjet (CIJ)

600 x 1800 dpi

500 feet per min.

2,200 IPM

KODAK PROSPER 7000 Turbo

Kodak STREAM Continuous Inkjet (CIJ)

600 x 900 dpi 600 x 600 dpi 600 x 450 dpi (at top speed)

1,345 feet per min.

5,523 IPM

A Slow Start with a Frenzied Fourth Quarter

Rolling Out the Rollfed Presses

Early 2023 activity centered around continuous-feed graphic arts presses demonstrated at Hunkeler Innovationdays (HID) in Lucerne, Switzerland.

HID showcased the Kodak Prosper Ultra 520 HD for the first time outside of their customer center and the HP PageWide Advantage 2200 for the first time outside the US. Kodak showed samples from the PROSPER 7000 Turbo, which became commercially available in 2023. Canon launched the ProStream 3000 series at HID with full commercial availability within three months.

The next series of launches clustered in October with a focus on sheetfed presses. All can be characterized as technology previews except for the long-awaited Ricoh Pro Z75 B2 press, which was previewed with select analysts in 2018, publicly announced in 2020, and became commercially available in November 2023. The remaining presses are A3/B3 format devices from Canon, Kyocera and Screen with commercial availability ranging from mid-2024 into 2025.

Canon previewed the varioPRINT iX1700 B3 press at Canon Expo in Yokohama, Japan. PRINTING United hosted Kyocera’s announcement of the TASKAlfa 55000c and the cooperation of Screen and Kyocera on the Screen Truepress JET 520.

The table above is a quick summary of the latest continuous-feed press launches highlighting the different approaches to serving the graphic arts segment. Piezoelectric, thermal and continuous inkjet printing technologies are all represented with differing native resolutions (which must be considered in the context of the number of drop sizes generated and the size and consistency of those drops). All the widths are two-up roll except for the Kodak Prosper 7000 Turbo, which handles paper up to 25.5 in. wide.

Sheetfed Inkjet Accelerates ISO 216 includes A, B, and C series paper formats measured in millimeters. The US typically refers to formats such as US letter, legal and tabloid sizes measured in inches. For purposes of this article, we refer to a press’ format as the closest B sheet size. Productivity is reported in sheets (SPM), letter images and A4 images per minute (IPM) where available.

Like the rollfed entrants, the newest sheetfed presses show an array of approaches for targeting the graphic arts segment. Table 2 shows a variety of strategies for meeting graphic arts requirements. The Canon and Kyocera presses are aimed

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The latest sheetfed inkjet press launches Table 2 PRES S

P R IN T H EAD S

R ES O L U T I O N

TOP PR O D U C T I VI T Y

Canon varioPRINT iX 1700

Canon thermal

2400 x 1200 dpi

73 B3 SPM 165 US Letter IPM 170 A4 IPM

Kyocera TASKAlfa 55000c

Kyocera piezoelectric drop-on-demand

1200 x 1200 dpi

146 Letter IPM

Ricoh Pro Z75

Ricoh piezoelectric drop-on-demand

1200 x 1200 dpi

75 B2 SPM simplex 37.5 SPM duplex

at making these capabilities accessible to a wider range of buyers through lower investment cost and smaller footprints.

Screen announced their collaboration with Kyocera on a version of the TASKAlfa 55000c to be launched in 2025, dubbed the Truepress JET S320.

This will provide a complement to Screen’s existing rollfed graphic arts presses.

Before we provide further details on each of these presses, I would like to point out that all of them will print on offset coated stocks. Some use a precoat to accomplish that goal, while others don’t, but we can clearly say that coated stocks are no longer inkjet’s kryptonite.

A Closer Look Further details on each of the presses are provided in alphabetical order by OEM name. Additional OEMs were contacted for this article and either did not reply or did not wish to release details in time for inclusion. We expect further announcements before and during drupa 2024.

To avoid redundancy, all presses use water-based, CMYK, pigment inks and are capable of printing on offset coated stocks and auto-perfecting/duplex printing.

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Canon ProStream 3000 (Available) The ProStream series is Canon’s top-of-the-line continuous graphic arts press. The latest generation, the ProStream 3000, builds on the success of the ProStream 1000 and 1800 models first introduced in 2017, with features intended to improve performance and respond to customer feedback.

The 22-in. press is available in two models offering speeds of 263 and 436 ft./min., respectively. The faster model uses a higher capacity hot air blower dryer and updated dryer configurations to process media as heavy as 200 gsm or 7-pt at full speed. The heaviest media supported

Canon varioPRINT iX 1700 B3 Sheetfed Press

has also been expanded to 300 gsm. At top speed the press will run at 1,200 x 720 dpi and slows by 40% to run at its top resolution of 1200 dpi.

A “Smart ColorGrip” feature optimizes the use of primer for different media, which positively impacts quality as well as running cost. As presses get faster, downtime gets costly.

Canon has included several features to maximize uptime, including inline quality control with automated nozzle monitoring and compensation, and automated splice handling. Canon estimates that this press has the potential for 30% greater uptime than previous models with a monthly duty cycle of up to 62 million US letter pages. This press is commercially available and has several installations in the US and Europe.

Canon ProStream 3000 Xray

Canon varioPRINT iX 1700 (Announced) On the sheetfed front, Canon has expanded their varioPRINT iX line of B3+ format presses with a new approach enabling a lower price and a smaller footprint than previous iX models. A vertically integrated press, the varioPRINT iX 1700 is the first production inkjet press to use Canon’s thermal printheads and comes with Canon’s PrismaSync DFE. With the new printheads comes a new water-based polymer ink containing highly saturated pigments and a supporting primer which Canon describes as a “conditioning liquid.”

The press, still in its “technology preview stage,” promises a new registration correction mechanism to simultaneously correct paper skew and horizontal misalignment to provide dependable image alignment at its top speed of 165 US letter IPM. An air feeding system supports reliable intake of a wide variety of media, but full details of media compatibility have not yet been released. Commercial availability is slated for 2025.

HP PageWide Advantage 2200 (Available) The HP PageWide Advantage 2200 with HP Brilliant Ink, which became commercially available early in 2023, represents a major revamp of the PageWide line. The visual difference is striking with iconic PageWide arch reduced by half. Moving components outside of the arch enables drying capacity and greater configurability in a reduced footprint.

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HP PageWide Advantage 2200 It also isolates sources of heat and moisture from the printheads, which should result in greater printhead life and reduced maintenance costs associated with thermal heads. The 22-in. press can be configured with up to three dryer zones and either active or passive cooling.

Like other PageWide models, the press offers multiple speed and quality modes: • Mono Performance: black only using single or high, drop weights at up to 800 ft./min.

• Performance: CMYK using a single, high drop weight at up to 500 ft./min.

KODAK PROSPER 7000 Turbo

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•

Performance HDK: using dual drop weights (high density) on black ink and single drop weight on CMY inks at up to 500 ft./min.

• Quality: using dual drop weights for CMYK at up to 333 ft./min.

The Advantage 2200 runs 40 gsm to 300 gsm or 14pt. media and uses HP Optimizer pretreatment fluid.

HP has long supported splice detection for automated winding systems, and the 2200 is no exception.

The updated Digital Front End (DFE) supports the HP Color Vision System with HP Quality Image Check (QUICK) Vision System Color Calibration.

With a duty cycle of up to 85 million mono images

KODAK PROSPER ULTRA 520 HD per month or 58 million color images per month, the Advantage 2200 is a graphic arts workhorse, but not the only one in HP’s stable. HP also made significant speed and performance upgrades to the PageWide T250 press, which also serves the graphic arts segment.

KODAK PROSPER 7000 Turbo (Available) The Prosper 7000 Turbo is the fastest of the graphic arts presses we are reporting on and arguably the fastest graphic arts press available even at the lowest of its three speed modes: • Quality: 650 ft./min (200 m/min.) at 600 x 900 dpi • Performance: 1000 ft./min (300 m/min.) at 600 x 600 dpi • Turbo: 1345 ft./min (410 m/min.) at 600 x 450 dpi I say “arguably” because, although the Kodak Stream continuous inkjet (CIJ) printheads and Kodak EKTACOLOR Inks deliver great quality at 600 x 900 dpi in Quality mode, this is not an apples-to-apples comparison with presses (including Kodak’s own) that deliver substantially higher native resolution.

However, for printing companies where offset media compatibility and approaching offset productivity are most important, this 25.5 inch wide, three-up press provides a robust option with an ultra-high duty cycle of up to 239 images per month. The 7000 Turbo supports media from 42 to 270 gsm and folding carton board up to 24-pt.

Coated papers must run in Quality mode. It became commercially available in 2023, and Kodak announced their first sale in August.

KODAK PROSPER ULTRA 520 HD (Available) The PROSPER ULTRA 520 HD uses Kodak’s latest ULTRASTREAM CIJ printhead technology offering a native resolution of 600 x 1800 (and fine 3.75 pl drop) with hardware-based Kodak screening technology to drive speed, performance and image clarity. It is unique in delivering its full speed of 500 ft./min. on coated and uncoated stock at top quality. With a 20.5-in. web width, the 520 HD can produce 2,148 US letter images or 216 B2 “sheets” per minute. Productivity is enhanced with support for auto-splice unwinding systems.

There are two versions of the press both using intelligent near infrared (NIR) drying. The C520 for commercial markets has four dryers and supports media from 45–270 gsm. The P520 for publishing markets with dryers supports paper up to 160 gsm, although it may run heavier papers at reduced speed.

This vertically integrated press, announced in 2022, did not become commercially available until new KODACHROME inks and OPTIMAX primers were launched this year. The new ink employs a proprietary pigment micro-milling process, which creates extremely fine nanoparticle pigments.

The press also uses the KODAK Intelligent Print System (IPS) to continuously monitor and optimize stitching, color-to-color and front-to-back registration and the KODAK 900 Print Manager DFE with ADOBE APPE 5 RIP. An optimized interface with KODAK PRINERGY Workflow maximizes production efficiency and data security. Kodak has announced the first sale of the press in August.

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Kyocera TASKAlfa 55000c B3 Sheetfed press

Kyocera TASKAlfa 55000c (Announced) Kyocera’s expansion of its TASKAlfa line will bring its small footprint, low running costs and entry-level price tag to a more demanding graphic arts customer.

Critically, the 55000c supports coated papers where the 15000c did not. This is achieved, in part, with a new ink chemistry that does not rely on primer for media compatibility. Kyocera 1200 dpi printheads and edge smoothing technology are key to quality improvements. It’s coming to market in Q2 2024.

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Ricoh Pro Z75 (Available) While the Ricoh Pro Z75 Digital Press is not the first B2 sheetfed inkjet press, or even the first aqueous inkjet B2 press, it is the first aqueous B2 perfecting sheetfed inkjet press, a gaping hole in the inkjet market that has not been filled.

Auto-duplexing a B2 sheet with the heavy coverage needed for graphic arts using water-based ink is not easy. Wetting and drying can damage the paper surface and impact registration.

Ricoh slow-rolled the launch with a beta cycle that began in mid-2022, and it became fully available last month. Ricoh has already announced sales in France, the Netherlands and UK in addition to the US beta site.

The press uses Ricoh Gen 5 printheads (2 bits/ drop) and proprietary inks and electronics. The Fiery N-500 DFE is a Ricoh/Fiery collaboration. The Pro Z75 uses adapted Ricoh Gen 5 heads housed in a water-cooled environment, runs Ricoh water-based inks, and the delivery system and electronics are also Ricoh technology—the DFE has been jointly developed with Fiery. Speed/media specs vary: • Runs media up to 310 gsm/14-pt. at 4,500 SPH simplex or 2,250 SPH duplex • Runs 310+ to 400 gsm/24-pt. media at 3,000 SPH simplex or 1,500 SPH duplex • Support for boards up to 600 microns thick enables packaging (no speed reported)

•

Will support media weights as low as down to 60 gsm uncoated and 80 gsm coated (by drupa) Productivity is further enhanced with a two-drawer, multi-sheet feeder and the option to connect up to four drawers. The maximum duty cycle is 1.7 million B2 sheets per month. It’s also notable that, while launched as a CMYK press, it was engineered with space for two additional colors. It can also be configured with an optional pre-coater intended for uncoated sheets.

RICOH Pro Z75 B2 (Perfecting) Sheetfed Press

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the

Here come

By Richard Romano

Since the Industrial Revolution, there has been the pervasive fear of losing one’s job to a machine. The original Luddites were opposed to technology for precisely this reason, and the original “saboteurs” were known to throw their wooden shoes (sabots) into machinery in protest.

Ever since, at least once a generation, this fear pops back up again—especially since the advent of computers. (And if an episode of “Star Trek: The Original Series” is to be believed, it will continue well into the 23rd century.)

In the printing industry, however, we have the opposite problem. No one need worry about being replaced by a machine; we are turning to machines because we can’t find people to begin with.

There has been much talk over the past half dozen or so years about “automation,” and if you ask five people what they mean by “automation,” you’ll get five different responses. Nine times out of 10, automation is used to refer to some kind of software that automatically processes files for production, generates estimates on-the-fly, or otherwise adds efficiencies to the production process.

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There are a multitude of robotic solutions for our staffing shortage.

But automation can also refer to hardware, and hardware automation is nothing new in printing equipment. If you had a photocopier as far back as the 1980s, you probably had an automatic document feeder. Commercial equipment has long had automated loading and unloading units.

What we’re starting to see now are robots, which I am dividing into two basic categories: parts (robotic arms, mostly, as it’s hard to think of any other human body part, the robotization of which would lend itself to any kind of industrial efficiency) and standalone units.

By way of etymology, the word “robot” itself was coined in 1923 and came from the English translation of a play by Czech playwright Karel Capek called R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots), which derives from the Czech word robotnik or “forced worker,” and which in turn comes from the Czech robota “forced labor, compulsory service, drudgery.” Let’s hope the robots themselves don’t find that out.

Parts Is Parts The most obvious place to add robotic automation is in a press-feeding apparatus. In the wide-format space, automated board feeders for flatbed presses have been around for a while, and robotic arms—such as that on the Agfa Onset X— are turning up in high-productivity plants.

For the Onset, Agfa offers a single-robot configuration for loading and a dual-robot configuration (loading and offloading). It can load from a stack or a laytable, and can offload to a stack or to an inspection or cutting table. These things can move fast, so there are several safety mechanisms in place to ensure employee safety, such as “hard guarding” (i.e., fencing), infrared sensing (which detects an incursion and stops the robot operation), or even a laser scanning system for the demarcation of the robot’s “cell.”

According to Agfa, the robotic arm has (ironically) a smaller footprint than a traditional feeder unit. It was hinted to me at PRINTING United in October that more Agfa wide-format units may avail themselves of robotic arm-based board loading.

At FESPA last spring, Durst unveiled its Durst P5 Robotics, a feeder/stacker unit comprising two Kuka robots to handle unmanned production for a complete shift. The robots can pick up media from different pallets up to 180 cm high, feed them and stack them separately. Printed media can also be turned 180 degrees for reverse-side printing and fed into a second printing system.

And elsewhere in wide format, cutting table manufacturers like Zünd and Kongsberg have also long had robotic arm options for table loading and unloading.

While wide format may seem like the best place for robotic loading systems—given the size and often weight of boards—these robots also have a place in certain aspects of commercial printing, like offset plate loading.

Agfa Offset Services recently spun off into a separate company—ECO3—and PRINTING United 2023 was their coming out party. They offer a

Durst P5 Robotics

ECO3’s plate-loading robot for its Avalon VLF platesetters wide range of products and services, but for our purposes here, ECO3 offers a plate-loading robot for its Avalon VLF platesetters.

A bespoke solution, the robot is designed and built based on a particular plant’s precise needs.

According to the company, the autofeeder can simultaneously feed multiple plate lines with a speed of up to 80 printing plates per hour, regardless of plate size. The robot is also integrated with ECO3’s Apogee software.

Loading and unloading boards for wide-format printing—or even plates—is not a million miles removed from loading and unloading corrugated sheets for packaging. Back in May, Bobst announced that it acquired a majority share in Dücker Robotics, a developer of robotic systems in both loading and palletizing in the corrugated board sector as well as folding cartons and perhaps even labels. In their announcement, Bobst indicated a vision for the future of packaging production in which the entire production line will be connected and automated—and robots are a part of that.

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Bobst’s vision for a robotic system to work across various corrugated board systems

A company called Rigorous offers a robot called the Box Hopper, which is designed to feed corrugated boxes into folder-gluers. Basically, pallets of boxes are given to the robot (or placed in its “robotic cell”—essentially the robot’s domain on the shop floor), it loads them into the hopper of a gluer-folder, and when the pallet is empty, it cleans up the waste and stacks the pallet on an outbound conveyor. The Box Hopper can load any box size (within a designated minimum and maximum size).

According to the company, customers that have installed a Box Hopper have seen a 15% increase in their folder/gluer speeds compared to manual loading.

Rigorous will also work with individual companies on more bespoke robotic solutions tailored to specific needs or physical space requirements.

OK, so that’s plates, wide format and corrugated boxes. What about general commercial printing? Finishing seems a logical place for robotics, and one concept out of Japan caught my attention.

Yaskawa, working with their partner Graphicrobotics, has developed the Levanto Paper Handling Robot for cutting/finishing in digital printing envi-

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ronments. Designed around Yaskawa’s Motoman SDA robot, Levanto is a “robot cell” (remember, a “cell” is the robot’s domain) that comprises a sheet-cutting line, a lifting table, the ’bot, and a vibration table for jogging the sheets square. It can lift 30 kg (66 lbs.). The goal of the robot is to eliminate manual transport time from a vibration table and the cutter, increasing efficiency.

Standalone Units It’s been suggested that at some point robots or “cobots” will be running about the shop floor, but that’s a ways off. However, some interesting units are appearing.

A cool one is from HP. In the architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) market, HP has launched a unique product called HP SitePrint, which is a robotic printer—kind of like a Roomba— designed for building sites that prints directly on the floor where walls, doors and other architectural features are going to go.

Traditionally, architects, building contractors and others would take the architectural CAD file, print it on paper, and those printed plans would be taken

The Box Hopper from Rigorous to the construction site, where an engineer would mark the floor where those features would go.

With SitePrint, the CAD file is loaded into the robot, which then trundles around the floor printing directly on the site—10 times faster than the manual process and with greater accuracy.

This is a little bit of a tangent, but HP recently conducted its first “State of Construction Productivity” study, which found that, like the printing industry, the construction industry is having difficulties with productivity and finding employees. We’ve all heard of (or perhaps even experienced) issues surrounding housing shortages. According to the HP study, 64% of construction professionals believe boosting productivity will improve housing shortages.

Ergo SitePrint which, after rollouts in North America and the UK, will be available in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

HP SitePrint

shining bright Electrophotography is still a star.

By Ralf Schlözer

Invented almost 90 years ago, electrophotography (EP) has been the mainstay of digital printing. However, it took a number of years for the technology to become commercialized—and even longer to be used for color reproduction. The beginning of the millennium marked the maturity of toner technology in production print, with quality finally rivaling offset lithography and productivity reaching new heights. But the limitations in print size and speed became apparent as well. Alas, inkjet entered the stage and the focus shifted.

After so much attention on inkjet, we expected little news and progress from EP technologies. However, the reality is different. Time to review the last 12 months of news and launches in EP technology.

Progress in Commercial and Document Print The use of EP technology spans a wide range of environments, from small copy shops, in-plants or quick printers, to large commercial plants, mailers and specialty printers. It is particularly the light- and mid-production markets where EP technology still offers the biggest choice and has the largest appeal.

The advantages of inkjet in running cost, print speed and format are less important for lower-volume users, especially when considering ton-

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er technology is tried, tested and well-understood by operators. In the heavy production market, inkjet is gaining ground based on lower running cost and higher productivity. Still, EP has an edge in specialty colors and certain applications, substrates and versatility.

According to data from Keypoint Intelligence, 93 billion pages were printed on EP production printers in the US in 2022. This is 35% of the total digital production print market for commercial and document applications. After some more growth, the EP volumes are expected to tail off, and by the end of the forecast in 2026 it is expected that 86 billion impressions will be printed on EP devices, still a substantial amount and a competitive market.

Most launches in commercial print are improved generations of base engines developed some years ago. Nevertheless, they usually offer improved usability, a wider substrate range, easier maintenance and better uptime—all important factors in daily operation. Sometimes the speed is cranked up as well.

Early in 2022 Canon launched the imagePRESS V-Series, a completely new generation of color toner printers in the imagePRESS series, which was originally introduced in 2006. About a

year ago, the new flagship press, the imagePRESS V1350, was also announced, noticeably upping the speed. With 135 pages per minute (ppm), the speed gap between the top speed color toner models from Fujifilm, Ricoh, Konica Minolta and Xerox was closed. First installations followed in 2023.

In August, Ricoh announced a new production printer, the Pro C9500, which is an improved version of its existing C9200 color press with, as Ricoh calls it, “more muscle and energy.” The C9500 sports the same imaging resolution, toner and mostly the same basic specifications as the C9200.

The speed remains unchanged but there have been some improvements in the fuser system to support printing on textured media and changes in media sizes. Also, the media range was extended down to 40 gsm. Further upgrades in the controller improve usability and give operators the opportunity to easily access the home screen from anywhere via a remote browser utility.

The announcement was followed by a new mid-volume production printer, the Pro C7500, which is the latest upgrade to the C7000 Series devices. The fifth toner unit that was introduced with the X models is now a standard, and Ricoh has added two extra metallic effects, gold and sil-

ver, to complement the white, clear, invisible red (for security applications), neon yellow and neon pink toners. Heidelberg is OEMing the new printers as Versafire LP (for the Pro 9500) and Versafire LV, both with Heidelberg’s own DFE and direct Prinect connection.

The company with the largest number of EP launches in the last 12 months is Fujifilm. After severing ties with Xerox, Fujifilm is building its own channel in Europe and the Americas and introduced the Revoria and ApeosPro brands.

Those products are the latest iterations of devices sold by Xerox today, with some slight upgrades as they are constantly being improved.

This year, Fujifilm introduced the Revoria Press EC1100, a 100-ppm production color printer, with the Versant 4100 being the corresponding Xerox product. At the same time they launched, the Revoria SC170/180 are the latest iterations of the Xerox Versant 280, only that Fujifilm now offers a 170-ppm version as well and a faster scanner. In addition, the company launched the ApeosPro series of light production color MFPs with improved quality, registration and paper range—which became available as “ApeosPro for Photo” version as well, tuned for photo print.

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Revoria Press GC12500 at PRINTING United

Apart from upgrading existing engines, Fujifilm takes a giant stride into the B2 format with EP technology by previewing the Revoria Press GC12500 at PRINTING United. The technology demo from IGAS 2022 is finally becoming a product. It features a format somewhat larger than B2 (66 x 75 cm or 26 x 29.5 in.) that allows fitting six A4 images on one sheet. It supports media from 64 to 450 gsm, opening up light packaging.

Crucially, the press can print duplex. So far, only a four-color version has been announced, but a six-color version is tipped to follow later. With a speed of 2500 impressions/hour (or 250 A4 ppm in six-up imposition), it targets the space between the SRA3-format, six-color Revoria 1120 and the B2 inkjet JetPress 750. The preview at PRINTING United should give important user feedback before the official launch in 2024.

In an interesting move, after the relations with Xerox turned sour, Fujifilm is OEMing some Revoria presses to Sharp. The BP-1200S Color Press Series offers up to six colors and a 120 ppm speed, like the Revoria 1120 on which it is based.

Shipping is set to start in Q1 2024. Also, two mono presses with 136 ppm and 125 ppm respectively were announced for mid-2024. All are driven by Fiery NX One Print Server as DFE.

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Even new monochrome presses are introduced, although the market is shrinking. Konica Minolta launched the AccurioPress 7136 series with improved automation, reliability and application flexibility. Canon revamped the varioPRINT 140 as QUARTZ model with similar targets.

EP Upping the Speed in Label and Packaging Print It might come as a surprise, but EP is the dominating digital print technology in most label and packaging markets today. IT Strategies calculated that in 2022 about 79% of the digital label volume was printed using EP technology. In folding carton, EP accounted for 64%, while in flexible packaging the share was 88%. Projecting into 2026, the share of inkjet prints is increasing, although this gain is only moderate in digital label printing, with EP still accounting for 76% of all volume. In flexible packaging and folding carton, EP’s share is dropping faster (to 68% and 46%, respectively).

It should be pointed out that, despite a declining share, EP volumes still grow noticeably in an expanding market for digital packaging print.

In an interesting case of coincidence, all major vendors of EP devices in label and packaging launched higher-speed devices this year. Xeikon presented at LabelExpo 2023 the LX 3000, nick-

named the Lion, marking its top position in the label range. It prints at a maximum speed of 42 m/min.

(137 ft./min.), 40% faster than the previous top-of-the-line press, while maintaining a 1200 dpi print resolution. So far only a version for a web width of 330 mm (13 in.) is available.

HP finally brought the HP Indigo V12 Digital Press to customer sites.

At the time of LabelExpo in September 2023, four beta sites were using the press. The press sets a new speed record in EP technol-

HP Indigo V12 at LabelExpo 2023

ogy with 120 m/min., beating the fastest inkjet label presses. In contrast to previous HP Indigo presses, each separation is printed by a separate printing unit, allowing a multiplication of the linear printing speed.

HP upped its offering in flexible packaging as well, with the HP Indigo 200K. The device is based on the imaging technology of the 100K B2 commercial press, but is adapted for web printing on labels and flexible packaging. The press is 30% faster than the 25K, the previous generation, reaching 56 m/min.

Finally, Konica Minolta introduced the AccurioLabel 400 Digital Label Press, the fourth generation of the label press. It reaches up to 39.9 m/min.

(130 ft./min.), which is 70% faster than the previous generation. In addition, the press now sports a white station. With Mark Andy, Konica Minolta has an OEM partner as well, selling the AccurioLabel engine as part of integrated label lines.

The Future of EP It is surely no surprise that the launches with the biggest speed gains fall into the label and packaging market, the market that promises the highest print volume growth. Improvements in commercial print are mostly more modest but can still deliver important productivity and application improvements for users, which can improve the bottom line directly. There are some surprise de-

velopments, however, that push the boundaries, such as Fujifilm’s Revoria Press GC12500, the first B2 dry toner press and HP Indigo’s V12.

As progress and scale in EP technology is getting more difficult to achieve, OEM deals, as between Fujifilm and Sharp, make sense and help recoup R&D spending. There is more action to come.

Although it only affects office printers and MFPs, Ricoh and Toshiba are pooling their resources. As of April 2024, research, development, and production of its business machines will be transferred to a joint venture, mostly owned by Ricoh, which will hold an 85% stake, with Toshiba Tec owning the remainder. Both, design, research and development, and production divisions will be condensed and absorbed into the joint venture.

EP technology came a long way to become a reliable, tried and tested technology. For good reasons, EP is the market leader in many digital printing segments, from SRA 3 to B2 in commercial cut-sheet printing as well as in label, flexible packaging and folding carton. This maturity, however, means that improvements are often more incremental nowadays and require more effort. It is very likely that more consolidation and cooperation is to come in the next years to make the investments worthwhile. Still, I would not count out some surprise developments in EP as we have seen recently.

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Thinking outside

the

box

RR Donnelley boosts digital capacity in packaging and display graphics with an EFI Nozomi Digital Press. By Cary Sherburne

A growing number of commercial printers and packaging converters are adopting digital printing technologies to deliver not only faster time to market with less waste, but an array of new applications that would have been difficult or cost-prohibitive to produce using conventional printing technologies.

Of course, we don’t see offset and flexo printing going away anytime soon. There will be demand for extremely long runs of packaging for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) for the foreseeable future.

There is market opportunity for digitally printed boxes as well as in-store POP/POS display graphics. Not only does digital printing virtually eliminate waste and inventory obsolescence, but it opens the door for increased customization of packaging and display graphics, seasonally, geographically and personally. Plus, digitally printed shipping boxes offer an opportunity for brands to utilize white space for on-box advertising (OBA). Finally, many brands are focused on improving the unboxing experience and taking advantage of better customer engagement as well as market visibility from all those unboxing videos on YouTube.

We recently had the opportunity to speak with Brian Techter, senior vice president of RR Donnelly’s Packaging and Labeling Solutions Group, who recently added an EFI Nozomi single-pass digital direct-to-corrugated press in the company’s Milwaukee plant. He talks about the reasons Nozomi was chosen, what he sees as the value of digital and where he sees it going in the future.

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WhatTheyThink Let’s start with an overview of RR Donnelly’s activities in the packaging space.

Brian Techter Sure. We have eight plants across North America in the packaging space. We also have several plants in Asia as well as a presence in Europe. The primary focus of our conversation today is around the EFI Nozomi, so we’ll just be focusing on our North American business. Over the last 10 years, our company has gone through a number of changes, including the fact that labels and packaging have become a huge focus for us as we look into the future.

We have made significant investments in those two spaces over the years, most recently the EFI Nozomi we installed in our Milwaukee facility.

WTT Across those eight plants, what are the primary products you are producing?

BT Our primary focus is on three products. Our number one product is folding cartons, followed closely by our sign and display graphics business and value-added corrugated, which serve the retail market, but also serve brands that would sell into retail. More recently, there has been a push to e-commerce, even before COVID, but that has definitely amplified during COVID and beyond. With the Nozomi, we can offer new and innovative services to our clients in the e-commerce space as well.

BT Yes, and with litho, you have the post-process of laminating it onto board. All of that goes away with the Nozomi. And Nozomi gives us added flexibility to combine jobs and just look at things differently, offering all of the benefits of digital.

WTT Nozomi comes in a variety of different configurations. Talk about the configuration you put in place.

BT

Brian Techter, senior vice president of RR Donnelly’s Packaging and Labeling Solutions Group

WTT Before Nozomi, were you doing any digital direct-to-corrugated printing?

BT We probably have a dozen different assets that have the capability to print directly onto corrugated as well as many other substrates, whether it is synthetic papers or plastics or magnetized stocks, things of that nature. Those are multi-pass large-format devices for the most part. They are really great for producing one board up to maybe a couple hundred boards. Once you started to get beyond that, from a volume perspective, the cost benefit of digital was very questionable versus a more traditional manufacturing process.

WTT You also have the upfront prepress costs and waste associated with those traditional processes.

We opted to add orange and violet inks to the standard CMYK. That allows us to hit 97% of all PMS colors, so it really expands the quality of printing and the range of work we can transition from traditional offset print. We also have pre-treatment and post-coating that expands the range of materials we can work with. We can basically print on any substrate from 24-point up to a half-inch, whether that’s paperboard, direct print-to-corrugated, and even a bleached white liner. The post-treatment process allows us to put down a variety of finishes, whether it is flood or spot gloss or matte or even some different textures we are experimenting with.

In reality, Nozomi allows us to produce a significantly greater variety of applications than we were able to run conventionally or on our multi-pass systems.

WTT What about some of the automation features?

BT On the automation side, we are adding robotic feeding on the front end. And then on the back end of the press, conveyor systems that will flow the finished, printed boards from the back end of the press to our new die cutter. And the die cutter has the exact same robotic automation feeding it. We will be able to bring pallets of material to the front end of the press and see a finished, die-cut product come out the back end, with virtually no human intervention.

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packaging side of our business, which is really any corrugated box that has graphics or print on it, not the brown box Amazon shipper that you see on your doorstep today.

WTT So you see some benefits especially for e-commerce?

BT Yes. There is a move toward ship-in-own-container to reduce the amount of packaging used. But you also want to be careful about what is printed on the outside of the box so as not to encourage porch pirates. One thing we are looking at is putting flexo print stations on the in-line rotary die cutter, so we could more affordably print minimal information on the outside of the box, a more simplified generic logo for example. And then on the inside of the box, we can print high graphic content that delivers a premium unboxing experience.

WTT So you are doing both boxes and display graphics, or plan to, with the Nozomi?

BT Correct. We do a lot of in-store signage as well as point-of-purchase displays. And then we do a

WTT That will be a big change from previous processes.

BT It’s really revolutionary. We do all of this today, albeit in multiple steps and processes, and not being able to look at high volumes beyond the hundreds digitally. This technology will allow us to run tens, and even hundreds of thousands. So it is ideal for our core signage and display business.

But what really makes it exciting is some of the value-added things we can do on the corrugated

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lot of corrugated packaging, whether that’s for e-commerce, the subscription box market, or even for the retail market such as the bulk packaging you see in club stores. We offer those products today. We envision the Nozomi being able to span across all those different markets, and to be able to do it in a much more efficient way as well as offer more benefits to those customers.

WTT Do you see a future where you might place another Nozomi in Milwaukee or in another plant?

BT Our core what you might call legacy retail plants that are focused on signage and point-of-purchase have been Milwaukee, St. Charles and Lemont.

Those are all located in a very small area in northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin. We chose Milwaukee because that’s where we had the space.

And it was also where we had the core benefit of converting some of our existing manufacturing to this new technology. I would say we definitely have plans to expand that. I’m hoping to have that problem in the very near future, where we sell this out and look for an additional investment.

WTT How do you see the migration to digital unfolding in the industry at large?

BT I don’t have a crystal ball, but I would see much more signage and point-of-purchase displays moving into the digital space. It already has been over the past three to five years as single-pass technology has become more prolific. The next step would be higher-end premium corrugated packaging, such as what you might see in a Sam’s Club or Costco. Some of it might be a bit more seasonal or promotional with lower volumes at the 100,000 mark. I think we could easily start to see some of that type of corrugated packaging volume

migrate to more digital in the future. When you get to uber-high volumes, though, you will probably still be better suited to use conventional printing, offset or flexo.

WTT Thanks for taking the time to share your views with our members. Anything else you would like to add before we close?

BT My background is in packaging engineering, so I’m very passionate about protecting the products within the package, which is the primary reason for the packaging, to make sure the product gets safely from Point A to Point B. But with the shift to e-commerce, it really presents a unique opportunity for brands big and small to be able to have that more intimate connection with the consumer when they receive the e-commerce package at their door. There are all kinds of innovative configurations and different layers you can introduce into that package, such as reveal flaps, that enhance the unboxing experience, creating that premium design experience. That’s something Donnelley has excelled at, providing our clients with those different options to be able to ultimately have those engagements with their customers.

EFI Nozomi

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Offset News The Roland 900 Evolution from Manroland Sheetfed It isn’t done anymore, but a time-honored trade show ritual for the offset press manufacturers used to be closing out their exhibits with a public announcement of the deals they’d signed and the equipment they looked forward to installing. These well-earned bragging rights gave interesting clues to what the industry would look like in terms of capability and capacity after the show was over and the new iron was up and running.

The offset vendors still publicize sales and installations to the trade media, and the information contained in their press releases is still a good source of intelligence about trends in the adoption of production equipment. For this report, we gathered as many media releases as we could find about installations of sheetfed offset presses in North America in 2023, up to the opening of the PRINTING United Expo in October. We then looked for patterns in the purchases that might shed light on what offset printers think is worth investing in, and why.

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A caveat: not every press sale is heralded in a press release, so the picture that emerges from this overview necessarily is a partial one. That said, we believe the sum total of the year’s installation news offers credible insight into what printers want in terms of format size, press configuration, UV curing and press automation.

Format Size With very few exceptions, the new presses were full-size B1 or near-B1 compact models for standard eight-up printing. All of the major sheetfed manufacturers offer half-size and sometimes smaller equipment, but the bulk of their sales now appears heavily skewed to platforms in or near the neighborhood of 40 and 41 in.

The preference for this format isn’t surprising among customers identified as packaging printers in the announcements. Commercial and publication printers are loyal to it as well, in part because

Taken together, trade media announcements about the sale and installation of offset presses have a lot to say about trends and preferences in the market for this equipment. By Patrick Henry

newer models now let them print short runs as efficiently as smaller-format equipment.

Another reason for the predominance of B1 is the steady migration of smaller-format work from offset to digital output in recent years—a reality that the offset manufacturers acknowledge by offering digital solutions of their own.

B1, of course, isn’t nearly as big as the biggest offset presses can get. One of the releases tells of the installation of a 57-in. machine at a corrugated printer in Indianapolis, and there are even larger formats than that. But, judging from what the offset manufacturers state publicly about their sales, equipment in the 40-in. range is what the offset market clearly continues to prefer.

Press Configuration Just two of the newly installed presses were four-color models, and only one consisted of five units. All the others were longer, with eight units as

the configuration most frequently seen. A number were perfectors, and many were equipped with coaters, dryers and other ancillary press systems.

One of the most potent advantages of offset press technology is that its equipment can be built to order in nearly any configuration the customer desires. That enables offset presses be flexible in design and application to an extent that less modular digital presses can’t match.

In fact, there seem to be few practical limitations on the ways in which offset presses can be envisioned and built.

One of the manufacturers recently installed a 42m-long machine with no fewer than 20 printing and coating units at one of a U.S. customer’s production sites in Europe. The customer wanted to be able to print complex combinations of colors and special effects on both sides in a single pass.

The manufacturer worked backwards from the requirement until the number and arrangement of the units were exactly right.

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Most other printers will not need a press this elaborate to get their work done. But if their jobs require printing with more units than the basic four—as much commercial and packaging work now does—the press manufacturers stand ready to accommodate them.

The market’s strong appetite for multi-unit, multi-capable offset presses is well documented in the sales reported by the press releases under review here.

LED-UV Nearly all of the presses described by their manufacturers as UV capable fit the description by virtue of their LED-UV technology. Like conventional, lamp-based UV, LED-UV lets the press deliver instantly cured sheets that can be sent straight to the postpress department for finishing. Eliminated is the need for hot-air and infrared drying, the mess of offset spray powder, and worries about ink set-off and ghosting in stacks of sheets that are not fully dry.

Conventional, lamp-based UV is still widely used both as inline units on the press and as offline systems. LED-UV owes its growing popularity to the fact that it draws considerably less power than conventional UV and generates none of the ozone, VOCs, and excess heat associated with the older process. Inline LED-UV units also have longer functional lives than conventional UV lamps, are modular and scalable, and are simple to maintain.

Operating economy, ease of use and reliable performance account for LED-UV’s inclusion in numerous installation announcements this year.

Although LED-UV curing is primarily a sheetfed process, it has begun to make its way into web offset production as well.

When a web printer in Massachusetts installed a 48-page machine equipped to dry in this way, it substituted a 36″ LED-UV system for what otherwise would have been a 45-ft. long hot-air oven.

This, according to the manufacturer, was like “replacing something longer than a school bus with something the size of a barbecue grill.”

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Press Automation Every press cited in the media announcements bristled with features for making the equipment run more autonomously, accurately and productively.

In a quiet way, press automation has been revolutionizing offset lithography for decades now. This becomes clear immediately every time a new offset press replaces two or even three older machines—it can produce the same volume they did, but much faster and with far greater operating efficiency.

Automation makes this possible by eliminating manual steps and mechanical routines that used to give offset manufacturing its reputation as a time-consuming, labor-intensive and spoilage-prone process. In contrast, a digitally controlled, highly automated press is almost sophisticated enough to be thought of as a member of its own crew.

Less dependent on the craft skills of veteran operators, an automated press optimizes makereadies, reduces waste and—most significantly— speeds job changeovers for more work produced per shift. With a one-for-two or one-for-three press swap, margins go up, labor and energy costs come down and offset becomes that much more competitive with digital alternatives to it.

The press releases tick off a long list of functions that are either largely or fully automated on new offset equipment: plate changing and logistics; blanket and impression cylinder washing; ink, air and other press settings; infeed control; inline roll sheeting; and ink management.

During the run, camera- and spectrophotometer-based systems for continuous register and color control hold variation to a minimum. Workflow integration links the pressroom to the prepress and postpress departments. Running data can be captured and stored for OEE analysis. It all conduces to press performance at top speed with top quality and maximum profitability per job.

The installed base of litho press equipment in North America includes many vintage machines that are ripe for replacement with the advanced press solutions available from the vendors now.

The companies profiled in the media releases un-

An RMGT 970PF-8+LED long perfector was shown in live demonstrations at this year’s PRINTING United expo in Atlanta.

derstood the economic necessity of embracing automation. As competition in the industry mounts, others with obsolescent machinery in their pressrooms will see the wisdom of doing likewise.

Conclusion At PRINTING United, only one working offset press appeared on the exhibit floor. This, however, was more a commentary on the highly diversified nature of that show than on the standing of offset lithography in the industry today. The leading vendors of offset technology were well represented as exhibitors. If presses were all but absent, the halls were bursting with providers of consumables, parts, software, ancillary equipment and support services for offset production.

The definitive venue for offset undoubtedly will be drupa 2024, where the prepress and print category comprises 282 exhibitors from around the world. Among them are 17 suppliers of sheetfed

and web offset printing machines. WhatTheyThink’s planned coverage of the event will include news of developments in offset—of which there surely will be plenty to catch up with, given that offset’s last showcase at drupa was in 2016.

In the interval between the shows, offset will continue to make its case as a competitive and profitable solution for printing applications of almost every type. Last year, senior executives of the five leading offset suppliers to the North American market briefed WhatTheyThink on how resilient the technology has proven to be in the face of profound changes in the markets that offset printers serve. This vitality is on daily display in offset plants everywhere.

The news from the vendors makes clear that offset is still far from reaching the limit of its improvability as a way to get printing done. We’ll keep a close watch on that progress and report its highlights here from now on.

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Executive Q&A WhatTheyThink sat down with Robert Barbera, director of production solutions marketing in Canon USA’s Business Information Communications Group Division, and talked about Canon’s commitment to production print.

WhatTheyThink Canon has become the market leader in production inkjet and has obviously invested heavily in inkjet, but not at the expense of toner-based machines. What is Canon’s toner strategy and what are some of the trends you have been seeing in the electrophotography market?

Robert Barbera As you noted, Canon continues to invest in developing new toner and inkjet presses and the workflow solutions to help improve productivity and grow print applications.

The imagePRESS is the key to our successful production color toner business. Last year, we launched our new imagePRESS V family of products with the imagePRESS V1000, and at PRINTING United 2022, we showcased the imagePRESS V900 Series and announced the high-end imagePRESS V1350. So this is a whole new family of imagePRESS color digital presses. The imagePRESS V1000 is a new mid-range solution with a clean-sheet design that expanded our offerings. The imagePRESS V900 Series replaced our very popular imagePRESS C910 Series. At the high end, the imagePRESS V1350 replaced our imagePRESS C10010VP Series and provides customers faster print speeds and the ability to print on heavier weight media.

We see a strong demand for our production toner presses and we continue to elevate the capabilities to help customers improve their produc-

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tivity and grow the range of applications they can offer. A lot of advancements in the imagePRESS V family are around automation, image quality and color control. The entire imagePRESS V family has inline spectrophotometers that with PRISMAsync or the Fiery—automate color calibration process” media calibration and color profiling process. As you know, finding skilled operators is becoming more and more challenging. Having the ability to automate and simplify the engine color calibration, G7 calibration and profiling are major time savings that any operator can easily execute. The person operating the imagePRESS V family with PRISMAsync print server can start the automated color tasks, and within a few minutes the process will be complete without any operator intervention.

The imagePRESS V family also has a Sensing Unit option which streamlines and automates the media optimization and color uniformity before the press run, and quality control during the press run with closed-loop control of the color and registration.

It is great to hear feedback from our customers on the positive impact that new imagePRESS V family and automated color controls is having on their business.

WTT Do you find that customers need to diversify and expand the products they offer, and how does the imagePRESS V family help them accomplish that?

the imagePRESS V1350 runs up to 450 gsm, allowing customers to print packaging applications.

One of our first imagePRESS V1350 customers in the U.S. is Choice Marketing. Their primary applications is printing sports trading cards which requires precision for front to back registration and color quality on heavy weight media. They’re ecstatic about the capability, repeatability and the quality coming off imagePRESS V1350 on the heavy weight media.

WTT As we talk, we just returned from PRINTING United, where Canon had announced two new entries in its production inkjet portfolio—the varioPRINT iX1700 and the LabelStream LS2000. Where do they fit into Canon’s general inkjet portfolio?

RB

RB Yes, customers are always looking for new print applications they can offer to help grow their business. We run a social media campaign called “Impress with imagePRESS” that highlights different high value applications that can be printed with imagePRESS. We are constantly exploring ways we can expand the range and sizes of media that can be printed to help increase application capabilities that customers can achieve with these products. For example, the imagePRESS V1000 introduced the capability to run magnetic media.

Both the V900 and the V1000 have the capability to run envelopes of various sizes. To help run synthetic media, we recently introduced a static eliminator designed to reduce static buildup that is sometimes found when running synthetics. And

At the same time as PRINTING United in Atlanta, Canon held the Canon Expo event in Japan, which is a very important strategic event for the company that showcases some of the current and future technologies. At this year’s event, Canon unveiled two new inkjet presses. The first is the varioPRINT iX1700, which is a high-quality cut-sheet inkjet production press running at speeds up to 165 letter pages per minute. They also showcased the LabelStream LS2000, which is a roll-to-roll digital inkjet label press. Both presses share some newly developed Canon inkjet technologies, such as brand new Canon printheads with a resolution of 2400 by 1200 dpi that are designed to deliver very high quality and fine detail. They also feature newly developed aqueous-based pigment inks—so the heads, the head cleaning and the ink circulation are common to both units. The LabelStream has an additional white ink for label film applications.

The two products were shown at the Canon Expo in Japan, and we had presentations around them at PRINTING United.

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imagePRESS V1350

RB The varioPRINT iX1700 fits a gap in the marketplace between the current high volume/high quality production inkjet presses and high speed toner presses. When I talk with commercial printers and inplants they are investigating inkjet for their operation, but some don’t have the current print volumes to justify one of the current high volume/ high quality presses.

The varioPRINT iX1700 has been designed to bring high quality inkjet to the larger audience in the marketplace—commercial printers, in-plants, direct mailers, and digital printers, with a price and position between our imagePRESS V1350 and the varioPRINT iX3200 series.

WTT When are they expected to ship?

RB The general availability is early 2025. We’ll start some early customer installs in the U.S. in the second half of 2024.

WTT So to switch gears now and talk about PRISMA. How has PRISMA evolved?

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PRISMA solutions have a long heritage with over 30 years of innovations and offerings, and as a result, PRISMA can mean different things to different people. Customers using our cut sheet production print presses may know PRISMAsync, which is our print server that drives our varioPRINT and imagePRESS devices. The high volume direct mail and transactional customers know PRISMAproduction, which is a workflow solution for Canon’s high-speed inkjet continuous-feed and sheetfed presses.

Canon has been constantly developing and expanding the PRISMA offerings and the PRISMA brand, and there are currently over 20 PRISMA offerings. So PRISMA has become a broad portfolio of Canon developed workflow solutions, applications and print servers for production and large-format customers.

Overtime, PRISMA has grown to be much larger than a specific product, but it has shaped into a broad portfolio that is tailored to specific customer business requirements. A good example of its value can be seen in our large-format business. Canon recently launched the PRISMA XL Suite, which is a combination of PRISMA tools to support wide-format printing. One of those tools is PRISMAelevate XL, which helps create tactile, textured dimension-

WTT Such as?

RB

al printing on the Arizona where you’re building up the layers of ink to create that tactile effect.

So whether you’re a small print shop or a large print factory there are specific PRISMA applications tailored to empower your printing capabilities.

WTT You’ve also moved PRISMA to the cloud.

RB Yes, we have recently launched a range of new PRISMA cloud-based applications and a platform called PRISMA Home. Developing PRISMA Home is a key part of our cloud strategy. PRISMA Home provides customers one portal to access and manage their supported PRISMA cloud-based applications and tools. Through PRISMA Home customers can easily administer their internal users, connect the different printers to specific applications and share their cloud storage across the various applications.

So the key part of our strategy was building this platform’s infrastructure. And now, we’re starting to bring out more applications and expand the supported devices to a broader range of Canon and non-Canon printers.

We have five different applications that customers can now access through PRISMA Home.

Some of these applications are provided as a value added applications to help support the customers’ business insight and production.

For example, we just introduced PRISMAlytics Dashboard v2.0 which provides a “pulse” of the printer performance and utilization. For instance, what’s each printers uptime/utilization? When are they running? When are they not running? When was maintenance being performed? When was calibration performed? How many color pages or mono pages were printed? How much of each media or toner/ink was used?

Users can very easily compare performance over any period of time and view the graphical results from all supported/connected printers.

They can also download the information for their own reporting. And the new version of PRISMAlytics Dashboard now supports the full Canon production portfolio including imagePRESS with PRISMAsync or Fiery, varioPRINT, Canon’s inkjet production presses and imagePROGRAF devices.

WTT There is also PRISMAcolor Manager, which we recently ran a Product Spotlight on?

RB PRISMAcolor Manager is another application in PRISMA Home that allows customers to efficiently validate their color output against standards (industry or their internal standards) and report and track the results over time. PRISMAcolor Manager is an open solution that provides colorvalidation workflows that support Canon and non-Canon printers and presses.

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PRISMA Dashboard

WTT

WTT

Aside from things like automation and the difficulty of finding employees—the top challenges of recent years—are there any other general industry trends you’ve been seeing emerge that are starting to become important to your customers and to printers in general?

RB Obviously attracting and retaining people is the biggest challenge for our industry. I would also say that customers—in-plants, commercial printers— are looking for new business ideas. What new types of applications can they produce? What are high-value applications? That’s what we’ve been showcasing with our print application samples to highlight a range of high value print applications.

Our goal is to help stimulate ideas and creativity with customers of what can be achieved on the imagePRESS with different media types and sizes, embellishment or inline finishing.

What you also see is the changing dynamics of the industry. If you went into a commercial printer 15 years ago, maybe70% of their work might have been offset and 30% was digital. Today, it might be 40% offset, 40% digital, and 20% w i d e format. Their business mix has changed. With the increased diversification of their business

48

they are looking to optimize their organization and processes to manage the work, quality and color across these different devices.

How do they achieve that consistent color across a digital press, an offset press, and a wide-format printer? Industry standards like G7 becomes very, very important here. Educating customers around G7 capabilities and how to easily implement it is becoming more and more important.

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What’s next on the horizon for Canon?

RB I have been at Canon for 11 years and it has been incredible to see the commitment to commercial printing markets through the various production and large format products we introduced over that time. We have become the market leader for digital production printing and there is much more on the way.

As I noted, we recently announced the varioPRINT iX1700 production inkjet and LabelStream LS2000. We are looking forward to bringing these exciting new products to market.

It is really an exciting time to be at Canon and to witness how our products and solutions are helping customers better serve their clients.

varioPRINT iX1700

imagePRESS V1350

Robust output and productivity with solid stability.

Say hello to the imagePRESS V1350 digital press.

This high-volume, color production digital press offers a seamless combination of powerful print productivity and labor-saving automation technology, and it’s been designed to help produce beautiful, accurate prints fast, easy, and efficiently.

imagePRESS V1350 shown with optional accessories.

Brilliant Vision. Inside and Out. Discover More: usa.canon.com/imagePRESSV1350 Canon and imagePRESS are registered trademarks of Canon Inc. in the United States and may also be registered trademarks or trademarks in other countries. Printer output images may be simulated. Specifications and availability subject to change without notice. Not responsible for typographical errors. ©2023 Canon U.S.A., Inc. All rights reserved.

10/23-2345-9596

A tangled web

Successful print production requires a web of workflows.

By Pat McGrew, McGrewGroup, Inc. and Ryan McAbee, PixelDot Consulting It is time to stop thinking of your production print workflow as a single, perfectly sequential set of processes for all your work—it is not! In every production printing segment, workflows are the threads that connect repeatable and auditable tasks, events and processes used to consistently move work from the customer to production and then from production to delivery. They begin at the point of customer engagement and job onboarding and continue through to completion, leveraging people, processes and technology to ensure that contracted work is completed and delivered.

The many workflows used daily in production environments are messy and complicated yet essential to getting the work done. Workflows are complex because they require the interaction of processes, systems, software, automation and, most importantly, people. Hundreds of individual processes represent thousands of tasks for every order following specific customer requirements.

There are also workflows that guide the business

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and intersect with your customer’s business.

Understanding and controlling the many workflows within your business is critical for success.

Regardless of the segment, for most printers, there are four core workflows: ordering, business management, production and delivery/fulfillment.

Ordering workflows capture the customer’s specifications and requirements for the work. In many segments, these workflows allow customers to self-service and manage all aspects of placing orders or re-orders through a web-to-print or other custom online portal. Orders may also be entered into job management systems based on interaction between the customer and the print shop staff or as the result of long-term contracts for specific types of work.

Business management workflows should be the single record of truth used to organize, manage and distribute critical information related to every order and job. Tasks related to the business management workflow include order entry, esti-

mating, job ticketing, purchase ordering, inventory management, scheduling and financial reconciliation and reporting. These workflows are integrated across the ordering, production and delivery workflows to capture and share data used in purchasing and other business-related decisions.

Production workflows focus on receiving data and creative content required for the product contracted by the customer. A common use case is a direct-mail campaign that would require the customer data and mailing information to be merged with the creative design for the mailer. Production workflow solutions are usually specific to each printing segment—commercial, packaging, wide format, signs, labels or transactional, for example.

Delivery/fulfillment workflows ensure that finished print products and any associated material are sent to the correct location at or before the requested time. These workflows often integrate with the business management workflow to receive customer and addressing data to deter-

mine the best shipping or delivery method based on time and costs.

Print service providers (PSPs) that offer variable-data printing also need a workflow for accepting, cleansing and repurposing data. PSPs that offer in-house creative design or are involved with their client’s creative value chain may also require specific creative workflows.

Regardless of the type, efficient, integrated and automated workflows alleviate and repurpose valuable labor hours to the best use, help control costs and maximize profitability, and ensure smooth operations and satisfied customers. So, how do you get there?

One to Rule Them All—The Business Workflow The business management workflow is the most important of all. It encompasses most, if not all, of your people, departments and processes required to manage, produce and deliver jobs. It is a single record of truth that is the indisputable

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source of customer, order, inventory, shop floor, costing and financial information.

Your customer support representatives (CSRs) use it to input and track customer orders. Your estimator uses the system to ensure production costs and profitability, in addition to checking resources are ordered or on-hand to produce the job. Shop floor staff and operators receive their daily production schedule and job tickets, then log time and materials using the system.

Because the business management workflow spans the entire business, these solutions require significant implementation time and are used for many years.

ing. There are multiple levels of integration possible that can be narrowed with three questions:

Integrated business management workflows leverage sophisticated software solutions. Depending on your segment of the printing industry, these systems have different names, but they are generally known as print management information systems (MIS) or enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.

The solutions are usually modular and sold with a core set of capabilities.

Based on the needs of the business, PSPs can add advanced modules like inventory management, business analytics or advanced fulfillment and shipping.

Integration is the key to linking and automating the primary workflows, so the business management software should have multiple standard methods for data input and output to other systems.

PSPs seeking to automate their workflows know it starts by integrating the business management system with other workflows. As an example, consider the integration points when customers can place orders online through a web-to-print (W2P) solution that passes orders to the print MIS to be converted to job tickets for production and track-

ly, or can the orders be batched using a timed interval? If generating dynamic pricing, the frequency must be instant to quickly provide the price to the customer when placing the order.

What data must be exchanged?

The customer configures their product(s) online, uploads their artwork, enters shipping details and chooses the payment method. The W2P solution must pass that information to the print MIS to create the order. One-way or two-way data exchange depends on whether a price list is used, or dynamic pricing is generated by the print MIS. What is the frequency it needs to occur?

Does the data need to be exchanged instant-

The workflows that sustain your business are dynamic, changing with your applications, skillsets and technologies.

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How can the data be exchanged?

The data exchange method depends on the capabilities of both software, frequency of exchange and other IT considerations. In many cases, CSV or XML files are exported from the W2P solution and imported into the print MIS, although alternatives like APIs might be possible.

Making it Work—The Production Workflow Typically referred to as prepress, the production workflow merges job specifications with the creative design so the data and content files can be prepared for the intended output. There are many workflows required based on the type of application being produced and whether there are requirements for variable-data printing and mailing.

A direct-mail piece requires artwork preparation, variable-data and addressing information merging, and sometimes dynamic layout execution based on the printing and finishing equipment used. Contrast that application with a 68-page static magazine that does not require variable data but needs extra attention to pagination and imposition so it can be finished correctly.

Of the many tasks that can be part of the production workflow, there are a few core processes that most jobs need: • File conversion for document reengineering or use within the production workflow software • Preflighting to identify and, in many instanc-

management, production and delivery/fulfillment.

Based on the type of work produced, supporting workflows may be optional.

Creative workflows are not required if you always receive prepared content from your customers. Unless you offer VDP (including data-triggered variable-content replacement) or mailing services, data workflows are also unnecessary.

There may be supporting workflows that are unique to your products and services. Customers may require approval workflows to ensure color and print quality. Sign shops that contract or offer in-house installation services need a supporting workflow to manage the process, confirm proper

es, correct issues in files that may cause errors in production related to fonts, resolutions, colors and more. Preflighting should run at multiple points in the workflow, beginning when the customer submits their content and again during the production workflow.

• Color editing, conversions and management for the intended output process • Imposing or arranging the artwork to maximize material and equipment usage and meet the final product specifications • Output to a raster image processor (RIP), digital front end (DFE) or electronic distribution like e-mail or electronic archive.

Automating production workflows requires integration to receive the job specifications from the order and business management workflows with automatic retrieval and processing of any data requirements and the creative layout. Typical integration points include the business management software (e.g., print MIS), other prepress and data tools used by CSRs or the prepress team, and file repositories or shared directories. More processes can be readily automated in the production workflow than any of the others, so look for opportunities to remove people-based touch points.

installation and obtain customer approvals. Printers offering embellishment options, like digital foiling or intricate laser cutting, may need supporting workflows to create the artwork separations and special output paths for processing.

The Supporting Workflows Supporting workflows provide critical inputs or extensions for the core work of ordering, business

Assess, Integrate and Automate The workflows that sustain your business are dynamic, changing with your applications, skillsets and technologies. At a minimum, they should be assessed twice a year to maintain high efficiency and identify opportunities. Inaction is the enemy of progress, so start now by assessing and documenting your current workflows. Focus on the few applications that generate 80% of your order volume (not print volume). Engage your teams to identify bottlenecks and gaps in the current processes—workshop with your team to uncover opportunities to integrate and automate using your current solutions and skillsets. If opportunities do not exist with your current solution set, it is time to document your needs and find solutions that can increase your automation and efficiencies.

PSPs continuously look for competitive advantages in the markets they serve. Too often, the focus is on the equipment and software solutions, which is a constant game of one-upping your competition.

Focus instead on creating your systems, workflows and automation to leverage the equipment and software in ways your competitors cannot.

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Meeting the Graphic of Smaller Enterpris There are vastly more small printing companies in the U.S. than large, or even mid-sized ones. Data on printing establishments reported by WhatTheyThink based on an analysis of the latest County Business Patterns report of 2021 Bureau of the Census data which covered US companies printing on everything from apparel, textile products, metal, glass, plastics, and of course paper using lithography, gravure, letterpress, screen, flexography, and digital processes.1 The report highlighted a number of points that have been fairly consistent from 2010 to 2021: • Small operations, those with 1 to 9 employees, represent 71% of all printing establishments.

• Operations with 10 to 19 employees represent another 12% of establishments.

• Taken together, operations with fewer than 20 employees represent 83% of establishments and number over 18,000 US companies.

Even with less than half of these companies printing on paper, this is still a vast target market for OEMs. This is before counting the numerous in-plant operations of similar size. This market is also highly diverse with production applications ranging from monochrome and “business color” customer communications up to high-coverage, graphic arts applications. What these companies have in common are upper limits on capital investments, price sensitivity on running costs, and a limited labor pool. This is the sweet spot for what we categorize as “entry level” inkjet.

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Serving the Entry-Level Inkjet Market When your entire annual payroll is under $1 million, it’s hard to justify a capital expenditure of $500K or more, but most B2 and B3 inkjet press price tags start there and range up to $900K. There is also the question of press format; from a labor and work continuity perspective, a multi-tray SRA3 or B3 perfecting press is far more efficient than a B2 format press. Trays can be continuously loaded with paper, and new jobs queued while the press is running.

However, it’s also hard for operations in this segment to justify paying for features that they don’t need. An entry level transaction printer, low coverage direct mailer, or manufacturer of monochrome paperback book bodies has a need for crisp text but does not require the ink coverage or color coverage of a graphic arts printer. They also have a much smaller media range to support. Even as many companies try to diversify their offerings to customers, those at the low coverage end of

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the production pool need to continue to produce those volumes cost effectively as they vie for new business. That is why it’s very difficult to deliver entry level graphic arts capabilities to any company that is not dedicated to high coverage applications with a need to support coated offset stocks.

The Graphic Arts Challenge High coverage was a major hurdle for water based inkjet to clear and, until recently, coated inkjet stocks were considered its kryptonite. Several roll- and sheetfed aqueous presses now deliver graphic arts quality output on coated gloss stocks, but this capability comes at a cost. They become cost prohibitive to use for non-graphic arts work.

That’s because these presses generally use: • A more complex ink formulation and/or a pretreatment to enable compatibility with coated stocks.

•

Expanded drying systems to handle a higher ink load without damaging the media.

• More nozzles with finer drop control to deliver higher resolution and color quality.

All these things add to the cost of the press as well as the cost of running and maintaining the press. More expensive ink, more energy to dry, and more heads to manage. In 2023, it is very difficult to meet these requirements in a press with a ticket price significantly under a half million USD. And what about the companies who produce 80 to 90% of their business on less challenging stocks?

Can they afford to print the bulk of their work on a high-end press to convert that remailing 10 or 20% of the volume? If work can’t all be run on the same machine, then there is the cost of additional labor overhead and floor space to consider. These are big challenges for inkjet OEMs and their customers.

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Kyocera’s Strategy Kyocera Document Solutions has already been working very successfully in the entry-level inkjet market. As I covered previously in “An entry-level press offering more than you expect,” Kyocera has installed nearly 400 of its TASKAlfa Pro 15000c presses since it became commercially available in 2020. This press is offered at price closer to the quarter-million than the half-million mark and delivers quality that meets or exceeds the needs of a wide swath of the entry-level market as we defined it. The press is cost effective to purchase and to run delivering G7 color targets on offset uncoated stock and a print resolution of 600 dpi or 600 x 1200 at reduced speed. As reported previously, it has a lot of features that you might not expect in an entry-level press, but it can’t serve the graphic arts segment without being able to print on coated stocks.

Fred Morrone, Senior Manager, Production Inkjet Marketing at Kyocera said, “We are big believers in creating an upgrade path for our customers, but we also understand that sometimes the market needs are too different to cost effectively deliver in a single piece of equipment.

That is why we are proud to announce the addition of the Pro 55000c to the TASKAlfa portfolio.”

Kyocera has taken the decision to continue to sell, support and enhance the Pro 15000c model while preparing to launch a complementary press to support the graphic arts market.

which Kyocera anticipates will be the lowest acquisition price in the market for direct to offset coated paper inkjet capability. Here are the details we have so far on the new press.

Kyocera reported that the paper path, drying, and printhead technology as well as ink and fluids chemistry was specifically designed to enable the TASKAlfa Pro 55000c to shine with a more demanding set of target applications.

Despite the differentiated opportunities for each press individually, Kyocera expects to see customers running both presses side-by-side in addition to individual installations. Through wide-ranging customer input Kyocera is confident that the TASKalfa Pro 55000C will be a solution for both existing high-volume inkjet users as well as new adopters of inkjet technology to migrate work from offset and toner technologies. This is the same pattern of adoption that has driven the success of the TASKalfa Pro 15000C since its launch.

Dustin Graupman, Senior Director with Kyocera’s Inkjet Division said, “We are coming to market with a press that will raise the bar on what can be accomplished by a financially accessible, sheetfed inkjet press delivering high coverage on a wide array of media including coated offset media. It’s important that we do this while continuing to meet the needs of our current customers and distribution partners.

We expect this to be a perfect complement to the Pro 15000C as we keep investing to expand the performance of that platform. We see them sitting side-by-side in many customer environments.”

You can learn more about Kyocera’s TASKAlfa Pro portfolio and see the Pro 55000c in action at drupa 2024.

The TASKAlfa Pro 55000c was announced at PRINTING United in October with commercial availability expected in the second quarter of 2024.

Introducing the Kyocera TASKAlfa Pro 55000c for Graphic Arts Production The TASKAlfa Pro 55000c was announced at PRINTING United in October with commercial availability expected in the second quarter of 2024. Pricing is projected to be under $500,000

1. The study did not include commercial enterprises printing on fabric (grey goods) or in-plant printing operations of companies with primary businesses outside of print. 2. For further details and configuration options on the current TASKAlfa Pro 15000c, see “An entry-level press offering more than you think” by Elizabeth Gooding.

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Sponsored Content

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Kyocera piezo drop on demand

Kyocera piezo drop on demand 4 gray levels

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New water-based pigment chemistry

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146 ipm (letter images)

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Uncoated offset, Inkjet treated, Inkjet coated, Offset Uncoated offset, Inkjet treated, Inkjet coated (Does coated including offset gloss coated not support offset coated stocks)

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6.92 x 8.27 in. – 13 x 19.2 in.

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52–400 gsm

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PCL6 (PCL-XL / PCL5c), KPDL3 (PS3), PDF, OpenXPS, XPS, PPML

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Press : Single Phase 200 ~ 240V 31A 1500W/5118.2BTU, 120 V 60 Hz 8.5 A/NEMA 5-15, 15A Drying Unit : Three Phase 208V 50A, Single Phase 200 ~ 240V 11A Paper Feed Unit : Single Phase 120V 15A Paper Output Unit : Single Phase 100V 2.7A

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Graphic arts: Marketing collateral, Corporate identity, Customer Communications, Direct Mail (letter mail), Sign & Display, Direct mail, Magazine/Catalog Books, In-plant printing operations Sponsored Content

The Production Print Issue

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what’s new in ink and coatings?

By Terry Clayton

The inkjet business and innovation engine gained momentum in 2023. I have personally observed higher attendance at inkjet technical conferences and industry events throughout the year.

In contrast to the analog printing outlook, inkjet is expected to grow and continue gaining market share from analog printing between now and 2030.

Along with traditional drivers related to speed and performance, sustainability and regulatory concerns are adding pressure on companies to develop products meeting a variety of market demands.

There have been several raw material innovations in the ink and coatings space related to inkjet.

In this article, I will look at a few new products I feel are notable related to innovation, sustaining, as well as regulatory concerns. I’ll conclude with some musings on where I feel more innovation is needed.

Innovation While digital inks sales are generally expected to grow, solvent-based inks will suffer in some categories as UV and water-based ink technologies make strides. Let’s explore a few new products with an exciting future.

Structural Colors Cypris Materials has developed unique pigments based on brush block copolymers. The colors are tunable and have reduced toxicity as compared to traditional dyes and pigments. The technology can be compared to the patterns creating a unique and iridescent color on a peacock feather. Cypris’ co-polymers have been engi-

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neered to rapidly self-assemble in inks to create specific colors. With proper formulation, color saturation can exceed today’s colorants.

BASF has partnered with Cypris to develop colors targeting automotive applications and the formulated coatings have surpassed chroma values of standard colorants. Cypris scientists are currently investigating inkjet ink formulations which will create effects not possible today.

Kronos 9900 From a food packaging perspective, water-based inkjet is clearly preferred over UV inkjet due to regulatory concerns. However, ink developers have historically struggled to prepare stable white pigment dispersions and inks.

Kronos Worldwide, a well-respected supplier of titanium dioxide pigment for inkjet, has been watching the global printing market. White water-based inkjet inks have traditionally been lacking in three performance areas: pigment settling, unsatisfactory opacity or hiding power, and shelf life.

In response to the growing demand for white inkjet ink and the struggles some ink makers are having preparing white dispersions, Kronos has developed Digital White 9900. This is a rutile white aqueous pigment dispersion with a solids concentration between 52–56%. It was developed using a proprietary process combining surface treatment and dispersion process. The 9900 is compatible with polyurethane and acrylic binders providing ink makers with a ready-to-use aqueous inkjet grade white dispersion with ideal rheology and storage stability.

Structured Urethane Acrylates + Ink makers producing UV-curable inkjet inks have long relied on formulations high in monomer content to deliver inks with low viscosity useful in piezo printheads. Limited amounts of an “oligomer” can be added to fine tune viscosity and enhance adhesion, weatherability and durability.

Within the oligomer class, urethane acrylate oligomers are useful provided their viscosity contribution to a final inkjet ink formulation does not exceed what the printhead can handle.

Arkema has added several new structured urethane acrylate oligomers to its platform, which can push tensile and Young’s modulus strength.

into packaging, textile and commercial printing, major brands require colors which are out of the traditional gamut. Even for ink producers vertically integrated into pigment dispersions, many find it difficult to justify the capital cost for additional dispersion lines. With traditionally lower demand for green, orange and violet gamut-extending inks, this a nice option to have.

The new dispersions are compliant with Swiss Ordinance SR817.023.21 for indirect food contact applications.

This allows formulators to design inks with tougher cured properties. Although some of the oligomers do have higher viscosity than that of the popular CN991, Dr. Endrit Shurda, senior research scientist at Arkema, has demonstrated that even at lower concentrations, these oligomers have demonstrated enhanced physical properties.

The novel structured urethane acrylate (SUA+) oligomers result in inkjet inks with increased tensile strength and elongation resulting in tougher cured ink films.

ten begin with a business summary covering goals and progress on “sustainability” initiatives. There is a good reason why. Beyond the intrinsic benefits to our planet, it’s how companies will stay in business.

Coca Cola has announced all packaging to be 100% recyclable by 2025. L’oreal aims for 100% of packaging to be bio-based, compostable or recyclable by 2025. Proctor and Gamble will have 100% of packaging recyclable by 2030, and Unilever will reduce the use of virgin plastic 50% by 2025.

The only way large brands will succeed in these aggressive programs is to enroll, among others, their suppliers, designers and converters.

Sustainability We have all noted that industry presentations of-

Extended Gamut Water-Based Dispersions Earlier this year, Fujifilm released water-based dispersions Image Source: Cypris Materials of Orange PO71, Green PG7 and Violet PV23.

The dispersions are prepared with Fujifilm’s proprietary reactive dispersant technology delivering dispersions compatible with a broad range of raw materials used to make aqueous inkjet inks.

As industrial inkjet drives water-based inks

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Algae Ink Living Ink is a biomaterials company that produces a carbon black pigment from algae rather than petroleum. Living Ink has already demonstrated the use of its sustainable black pigment in screen, flexographic and offset inks, and even on apparel.

Recently, the team brought on ink industry veteran Tom Van Kuren to lead R&D of their proprietary inks and dispersions. I wouldn’t be surprised to see digital inks in the not-to-distant future.

Because the carbon black is produced from carbon dioxide rather than oil, every kilogram of algae pigment produced removes 4 kg of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

Joncryl BRC BASF has recognized the need for binders for inks and coatings, which offer a higher bio-renewable content (BRC). Joncryl BRC resins are typically >50% bio-based, have a reduced carbon footprint (based on Life Cycle Assessment), reduced volatile organic compounds (VOC), and are food contact compliant.

BASF has already released four Joncryl BRC binders. They will soon release Joncryl HPD BRC 596, a high-performance pigment dispersant grinding resin which boasts > 70% bio-renewable content in solids.

Genomer 3135 To help ink and coating formulators boost the bio-renewable content of UV curable formulations, Rahn has recently introduced a new oligomer. Genomer 3135 is a bio-based polyester acrylate which can enhance flexibility in inks and coatings. With a bio-renewable content of 65%, this oligomer has low viscosity, 250% elongation and good adhesion properties.

Regulatory PFAS & PTFE There is growing concern related to perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS). PFAS are chemicals used in a wide variety of industries because of their unique resistance to grease, water and heat. They are called forever chemicals

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because they break down very slowly and they can accumulate in our bodies.

Ink and coating companies are now evaluating product portfolios to reformulate away from PFAS or PTFE altogether. Some strategies are to use PTFE, which is highly purified not to contain low molecular weight PFAS. Others are simply planning to remove PTFE altogether.

Micropowders has developed a high-performance wax additive which provides high surface lubricity along with rub and scratch resistance. MP-28AL, a synthetic wax and aluminum oxide product, is both an alternative to PTFE and biodegradable. In coating formulations MP-28AL reduced COF properties lower than a PTFE based control.

Where is Additional Innovation Needed?

Water-Based Inkjet Inks for Packaging Inkjet-printed packaging is forecast to grow significantly in the next five years. Water-based inks are the preferred ink technology for food packaging due to environmental and regulatory perceptions. However, flexible packaging is technically challenging for water-based inkjet inks.

Printheads capable of jetting higher viscosity inks such as the Xaar Aquinox may help by opening the formulation window for ink chemists. Inks which balance printhead life, dry time and substrate adhesion are required. Specifically, there is a market need for novel binders, wax emulsions, adhesion promoters and general formulation additives, which will improve performance of water-based inkjet ink for packaging.

Photoinitiator Innovation A popular photoinitiator for UV LED ink and coating formulations is diphenyl(2,4,6-trimethylbenzoyl)phosphine oxide, commonly referred to as TPO. It will be added to the Substance of Very High Concern List (SVHC) list and reclassified as reprotoxic category 1B. Therefore, TPO may be subject to restriction under REACH.

Image Source: Fujifilm

REACH is the EU regulation governing the manufacture and import of chemical substances. The acronym “REACH” stands for “registration, evaluation and authorization of chemicals.” Ink manufacturers are currently evaluating the impact this will have on their business as well as exploring alternative formulation strategies.

This includes the substitution of TPO with ethyl(2,4,6-trimethylbenzoyl) phenylphosphinate (TPO-L) and phenylbis (2,4,6-trimethylbenzoyl) phosphine oxide (BAPO). Cure speed and solubility are some challenges of these approaches.

Other photoinitiators have introduced other challenges related to cost, ink stability and even yellowing issues. There is a need for a commercial photoinitiator that is high solubility, nonyellowing and fast curing with UV LED. And, of course, low cost would be fantastic. The challenge here is the time and cost of development including registration with the EPA, filing for TSCA and REACH registration. Collaboration between ink and coating manufacturers and photoinitiator producers would help drive effective new products.

Printheads As mentioned earlier, the Xaar Aquinox (and Nitrox) printhead will open up the formulating window as these printheads can handle higher viscosity fluids. As industrial inkjet moves into product manufacturing, packaging and direct-to-object applications, new printhead technology is needed.

High definition printheads are great when you’re printing at a 1.5mm print gap, onto premium substrates, and in a clean environment. But when the print gap is larger, and the environmental conditions are not tightly controlled, quality erodes quickly and productivity drops significantly.

The success of industrial inkjet requires us to take a new perspective at how printheads are designed.

Xaar is on the right track with enabling higher viscosity. Printing at a higher gap will require larger drops (and less satellites) to make it to the substrate without being lost in air turbulence.

I would personally like to see more printhead manufacturers looking at how a printhead needs to be designed differently for industrial inkjet as compared to wide format graphics. Printhead innovation for industrial inkjet will unleash a surge of growth into packaging, 3D, direct-to-object and many other industries.

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Wallpaper on demand from Raspberry Creek

Fast tracking fashion

Inspiring stories from the world of on-demand textiles and apparel

By Cary Sherburne

On-demand production has transformed many industries. Our members will remember how on-demand digital printing began the transformation in the commercial printing industry back in the 1990s, and then turned signs and display graphics upside down as well. On-demand production has been slower to gain traction in textiles and apparel for a number of reasons, including evolving quality, availability of ink sets and more over the years.

Today, there are fewer, if any, of those barriers.

The biggest barriers are the mindsets and business models of brands and retailers, that are still delivering the dreaded “fast fashion,” cheap clothing that lures in consumers but rarely lasts long, with most of it ending up in landfills around the globe.

According to a recent report from TheRoundup. org, the world produces 92 million tons of textile waste every year. Clothing and textiles currently make up at least 7% of the total amount of waste in global landfill space. Some of it will degrade, but a lot of it won’t—since some 60% of apparel consists of poly or poly/cotton blends, and even “pure” cotton often contains elastin—we love our stretchy fabrics—which delays any biodegradation of the material, or prevents it altogether. And yet, between 80 and 100 billion new clothing garments are produced globally every year.

The report goes on to add that, despite what we hear about recycling, upcycling, reuse and takeback programs, only one percent of clothing gets recycled into new garments.

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Brands and retailers drive a lot of this, using antiquated business models that foster way too much waste. But consumers are at fault, too. As long as they continue buying, brands and retailers, understandably, will continue to produce.

However, we now have the technology that lets them produce at least some of it on-demand, made to order. In this article, we again take a look at two companies that are making a difference and are inspirational—as they and other on-demand manufacturers grow and begin to take more market share, brands and retailers—and consumers— are likely to take notice. But will it be fast enough to make a difference to our fragile planet?

Raspberry Creek Fabrics continues to grow and diversifyw Our first example is Raspberry Creek Fabrics, located in Salt Lake City. They produce custom fabrics on-demand using digital printing technologies, a sustainable approach to producing apparel fabrics. The company is also primarily using Western Hemisphere mills, and partners with some local cut-and-sew shops if customers want that service. Also new is an integration with Etsy and a booming wallpaper business.

Using Western Hemisphere fabric mills is a clear differentiator for this company, not only supporting Made in America, but also eliminating the greenhouse gas emissions associated with importing fabric from Asia, as well as mitigating some of the human rights issues associated with the industry, especially in Asian markets.

“We had kind of a revolution around here last year,” said Co-Founder Justin Rammell. “We were able to automate our printing, and we now have full web-to-print automation from our Shopify website that takes orders right through color management, through the RIP, does some sizing magic, labels customer orders and more. That automation has really opened the world up for us to be able to process orders faster and continue to make some improvements. The biggest improvement we’ve made is we opened an online marketplace, and we’ve got over 500 designers who have contributed about 55,000 images to the site in the past year. That’s an explosion for us. In addition, this automation has allowed customers to scale the design to any size they like.”

For example, they might like a smaller scale for pillow covers or baby clothes, and a large scale for things like drapes or bedding.

“But this also comes with a lot of challenges. It can be overwhelming for customers to find a design they like with all of the choices.”

It can also be difficult for customers to visualize what a design will look like in the final product. To address that, Raspberry Creek has implemented a 3D modeling feature.

“On our fabric product page, you can see your design on a dress, on a pair of shorts, or on a blanket that’s 3D contoured, modeled and shaded,” Rammell said. “We actually worked with a video game development company to make sure that the flat fabric was able to be modeled in an appropriate way so that a swimsuit looks like a swimsuit.”

Raspberry Creek also found pent-up demand for wall coverings, customized and produced on-demand. More than 6,000 wallpaper designs are now available, with more to come. They are also working to deliver the ability to produce panels.

“Designers will be able to upload a whole quilt panel or a blanket panel and be able to print the whole thing in addition to step-and-repeat fabric,” Rammell said.

The company is also exploring direct-to-garment alternatives.

Fabric designs from Raspberry Creek’s Christmas 2023 collection

A key focus for Raspberry Creek is producing fabrics for moms sewing for their kids.

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Semi-automated sewing “I think we are going to see print-on-demand reaching into more aspects of our life to make things more customizable and meaningful. And that’s the sandbox we are playing in.”

It is innovation and creativity like this that will help spur growth further for Raspberry Creek and other relatively new entrants to the market that are not constrained by past practices, or “we’ve always done it this way” thinking. The more new folks that get into the game, the more pressure that will put on traditional manufacturers. We have seen this over and over again as industries undergo an analog-to-digital transformation. Let’s hope the transformation accelerates in this industry.

On-Demand Production of Apparel: BMC.fashion Offers a Modern and Sustainable Approach We’ve often written about Kirby Best’s BMC.fashion, a digitally-oriented cut-and-sew shop located in Phoenix. It’s about as automated as technology allows today, including use of robots to move fabric pieces and accessories to the most appropriate sewist. He has also incorporated a unique training technique called “Seam Theory” that enable a new sewist to onboard in as little as a day. Those are just a few of the company’s breakthrough ideas, put into action, by an industry thought leader.

Not to jinx it, but it seems that business is booming, and Best is looking at possibly opening

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two more plants. He recently signed a significant contract in the bridal industry that adds up to 500 dresses per day, in addition to shirts, coats, dresses, etc. for his other clients.

The goal is lofty—ultimately to have up to 10 factories, five in the U.S. and five internationally. That would likely make BMC.fashion the largest producer of on-demand fashion in the world, taking a chunk out of the pollution and greenhouse gas emissions caused by the traditional manufacturing.

In addition to cut-and-sew, BMC.fashion will also sell digitally printed fabric, starting with a contract out of Australia.

“When we set up the factory,” he said, “we didn’t anticipate selling printed roll fabric. But customers always surprise you!”

He also has a contract with a very upscale and exclusive T-shirt company, Memento Apparel.

“They are capturing images from high-end photographers around the world,” Best said.

“The T-shirts are beautifully designed and really unique, with very limited production runs. This is not direct-to-garment; we will actually be sewing them. And since we are digital, the tags are printed right on the fabric.”

Sustainability is a big benefit of the factory as well. In addition to less waste due to a made-toorder strategy, Best said that his Kornit press uses only 250 gallons of water every six months, a huge

savings over traditional processes.

“You have to print less and move it around less,” he said. “That’s certainly our goal. I have a granddaughter now, so I’m always thinking about what we are doing to leave the planet in good condition for our kids and their kids. Having a grandchild really wakes you up—this is a long-term game, not hour to hour.”

The model is perfect for the bridal contract.

“When we did our initial research on which garments to think about based on market size, the category I didn’t even know was a category that came right to the top was bridesmaids dresses,” Best said. “Some 97% of the industry has gone offshore, and people have to wait longer for dresses.

Plus it can be hard to get the right style or fit. In the North generally, they are going more towards wearing whatever they want but with a certain color profile. In the South, it’s much more traditional, with everyone having the same dresses.

Our benefit is we can produce them on demand, with accurate sizing for each person. And they don’t have to have all that money out there, paid six months in advance.”

As he explains the market, there are roughly 2.4 million weddings a year in the United States, with 4.32 bridesmaids. Rather than peaks, there are actually two dips—July and December. Otherwise it is incredibly consistent year round.

“We’ve also designed the program so they can mix and match—I want this bodice but this skirt, and I want this sleeve on it. We will launch with 23 colors in three different fabrics and expand from there. And we will typically ship within two weeks and be price competitive with Asian brands.”

In addition to all of this, BMC.fashion is installing knitting machines to experiment with and to expand the types of fabrics they can offer. He has also installed on-demand thread dyeing, potentially eliminating another waste factor—unused thread.

If anyone can pull all of this together, it’s Best.

It could really be a market accelerator in driving more manufacturing back onshore.

BMC robots

A view inside the BMC.fashion factory

Driving Change These two companies are just a snapshot of what’s actually happening. The cut-and-sew business is quite fragmented, but even so, it’s starting to return onshore. There will still be imported apparel, of course, but to the extent that Raspberry Creek, BMC.fashion and others can gain traction, the better it will be for the environment—and the more convenient it will be for the end customer.

This puts a different spin on “fast fashion,” which I and others have been railing against. It’s fast, but it’s high-quality stuff that is not as likely to end up in landfills. We applaud the emerging digital community in textiles and apparel that is poised to drive significant change and more the industry in a more sustainable direction.

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Johnson’s World This Christmas, get a Clue. By Steve Johnson

Recently, three of my out-of-town grandchilie, books, a play, a musical, a TV show and many dren spent a week at my house. Born in a different game variations. Even though there is a Clue cellcentury, these teenage and pre-teen kiddos have phone app, none of my grandchildren had ever never known an analog world. Digital electronics are heard of the game. In fact, it is safe to say that attached to their bodies in the form of cell phones. board games, like newspapers and magazines, We call them phones, but children rarely make have never been a part of their leisure activity. telephone calls in the old-fashioned So how did the kids like Clue? They DETECTIVE NOTES sense. Instead, they utilize a dizzying loved it. They loved the tactile sense array of ever-changing programs on Suspects of rolling a die and physically moving Col. Mustard these multi-functional communicaa playing piece across squares on the Prof. Plum tion devices. FaceTime is probably board. They loved sitting around a taMr. Green Mrs. Peacock the closest they come to a phone call, ble in the living room, getting the big Miss Scarlet because why would they want to talk picture of the playing field rather than Mrs. White without video? squinting at a 2½ x 5-in. screen.

Nor do they make use of email. Tex- Weapons They loved devising their own Knife ting and chatting are their go-tos, since methods for notating clues and using Candlestick only real-time communication makes pencils to mark the printed Detective Revolver Rope sense in their instant-gratification world.

Notes sheets instead of typing and Lead Pipe These kids have had digital devices swiping. They loved holding the playWrench their entire lives. Any concerns their ing cards, and unveiling the winning parents had about digital media being Rooms solution sequestered in the printed Hall harmful for young children was outenvelope in the middle of the board.

Lounge weighed by the sheer convenience of They asked to play again and again Dining Room Kitchen constant contact with their offspring. as they developed a mastery of the Ball Room Each phone is loaded with the Life360 game, but the single best “clue” to Conservatory app, which allows their parents to contheir enjoyment was the complete Billiard Room Library stantly monitor their whereabouts. absence of cellphones from the play Study How did this generation fare during area. Not prohibited by grandparents, their week spent with Grandad and Grandmom in cellphones were voluntarily (and subconsciousJohnson’s World? ly) relinquished as the game fully absorbed their I’ll give you a clue. Yes, Clue: Hasbro’s (formerattention. Like printed books, physical games enly Parker Brothers) classic detective board game. gender deep thinking.

Released in 1949, Clue has remained wildly popuThe season of gift-giving is upon us. You could lar throughout its history. Last year Better Homes give the kids more gift cards (yes, those are print& Gardens magazine rated it number two on its ed products) but why not put a bit more thought “50 Best Board Games of All Time” list. and effort into this year’s Christmas presents?

Unusual for a game, Clue has spawned a movC’mon, get a Clue.

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Naughty but nice christmas cocktail

The WhatTheyThink 20th Anniversary Party

Instructions

4 ounces rye whiskey, bourbon or vodka 2 ounces orange juice 2 ounces ginger syrup 4 ounces cranberry juice 4 ounces club soda ice orange slices and fresh cranberries

To a cocktail shaker filled with ice, add your liquor choice, orange juice, ginger syrup and cranberry juice.

Shake well to combine.

Divide evenly between two glasses and add extra ice if needed. Top with club soda. Garnish with an orange wedge and fresh cranberries.-

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