It’s a digital world at Hewlett Packard, and their recent pre-drupa event in Israel revealed (for those who didn’t know already) their desire to add more digital colour to your world.
Journalists and analysts converged on Tel Aviv for an information-packed four days in which HP executives revealed their hopes for the company’s future, and the innovations that drive their plan to become, in VP Steve Nigro’s words, “the world’s leader in digital graphic arts.”
There was a lot of talk about the somewhat nebulous-sounding “Print 2.0”. Cursed with the fate of most slogans, the words “Print 2.0” themselves can’t fully explain HP’s overarching strategy. Fortunately, all of the executives on hand were well-versed in fleshing out the headline and explaining what HP is doing and plans to do. “Print 2.0”, according to Steve Nigro, is “about making it easier to print from the web, extending digital content creation and publishing platforms, and delivering next-generation digital printing platforms.”
So what does that mean to printers on the ground? Basically, Print 2.0 is a more consumer-involved and proactive version of printing. Rather than waiting for customers—trade or consumer—to come to them, HP is encouraging digitally-equipped printers to go out and position themselves in their markets as providing digitally-produced pages that are more intrinsically valuable than their analogue counterparts. This increased value could be due to such traits as their variable content, their short run length, or their tailored-to-the-consumer specificity.
Photobooks—perhaps the most talked-about print product since Gutenberg’s Bible—are of course one such example of high-value digital pages that weren’t possible with analog technology. And while photobooks are a boon for print providers astute or fortunate enough to have contracts with the Wal-Marts and Shoppers Drug Marts of the world, there are still opportunities for smaller or less-well-connected printers to carve out their own piece of the digital page pie. According to HP’s internal estimates, digitally-produced pages account for only 2% of the global pages produced in 2007. In terms of dollar value, though, digital accounted for 16%. By building skills in marketing, variable content production, and actively seeking more pages, rather than waiting for customers to come to them, print providers can capitalize on all the resources that digital presses and printers can offer.
HP Canada’s Danny Ionescu was also quick to point out that HP isn’t just pushing printers and presses on anyone who will buy them. He spoke of readiness assessments that HP carries out with print providers looking to purchase an HP machine, and assured me that HP will decline to make a sale if they feel that the provider is not ready to fully take advantage of the opportunities that digital offers.
HP is looking to digitize the entire print process, from creation to consumption, and they have both hardware and software currently available or coming soon that will help with that digitization. The (literally) largest announcement made in Tel Aviv was of a new, four-colour Inkjet Web Press, which is slated for release sometime in 2009. With the inkjet web press, HP is looking to create a market for a “distribute-then-print” model—newspapers are one possible market—that distributes content to local centres where it is then combined with local content, personalized, and printed.
The web will be up to 762 mm or 30 inches wide, allowing for 2600 8.5 x 11 letter-sized impressions per minute (400 ft/minute x 30 ft wide). The size of web also means that a conventional broadsheet is possible to produce—a limitation that has felled other inkjet providers who have attempted something similar in the past. Quality is up to 600 x 600 dpi, and a duplex print engine configuration will set providers back less than $2.5 million (USD).
The colour inkjet web is HP’s attempt to create a new market segment, and is a bold move into the offset-dominated newspaper territory. In order for the inkjet offset to be successful, print providers will need to buy into the notion of a more personalized newspaper than has previously been possible, and will need the software and technical know-how to make such personalization—or at least localization—viable. HP is of course also planning to provide logistical and software support to any vendors who purchase the press—through their “Capture” business development program—and asserted at the event that the press was in fact developed in response to requests from customers.
As the press is still in development, we were unable to see anything beyond digrams and conceptual drawings, but they have promised more information at this year’s drupa.
Also on the hardware side of things, HP announced more advances in its Indigo line of digital offset presses, adding features to the 3500 and 5500 that they launched a year ago and introduced the higher-efficiency Indigo 7000 press. The 7000 is targeted at printers producing over 1 million A4-equivalent pages per month—those in the 500,000 to one million range are still best to stick with the 5500. The 7000 uses 25% less electricity per page, as compared to the 5500, and has an onboard oil recycling system, which is also now available on the 3500 and 5500. The rated speed of the 7000 is 120 ppm in 4-colour and 240 ppm in 1- or 2-colour, and HP estimates the breakeven of an 8 page brochure to be 1808 pages (when compared to an A3 offset) or 1095 pages (as compared to a B2 offset).
Concurrent with the Indigo 7000 was the announcement of the WS6000 label press, which is optimized for longer jobs (greater than 1000 linear metres), and the W7200 commercial web press. With four-colour speeds up to 30 linear metres/minute, a broad substrate range, and optional in-line converting, the WS6000 is also a significant improvement over the WS4500.
Indigo is also moving slowly into inline finishing, with an inline UV coater option now available for the 5500 and 7000. The 5500 can also have a ganged feeder, which raises the number of discrete feeder trays to 7 (from the existing 4), and has a new 18 pt substrate option geared towards folding carton applications.
Not to worry if you just purchased a 5500 and are interested in some of the new options—they are all compatible with exisiting 5500 machines.
Moving towards the software side of things, HP is not alone in offering data solutions to their vendors, and they have partnered with several other providers to offer solutions with their SmartStream workflow. Refusing to reinvent the wheel, as one executive put it, is key to their strategy with SmartStream. If they saw someone who was doing what they wanted to do, and doing it well, they partnered. Creo, EskoArtwork, and Heidelberg Prinect are just a few of the partners who participate in HP’s a la carte workflow solutions for their vendors.
Environmental benefits were also a much-talked-about feature of HP’s plans, though
it would be surprising if that were not the case, as environmental considerations are on the lips of everyone in the industry these days.
Many of the so-called environmental benefits of digital presses are merely increased efficiencies, and not true footprint reduction. For example, digitally-printed pages are often described as reducing the number of pages printed, since one personalized digital page is more effective than a mass-produced advertising circular. But the increased effectiveness of digital pages doesn’t necessarily translate into fewer pages printed—it could just as easily mean the same number of high-impact personalized pages, distributed to a larger number of people. But HP did have a number of genuine environmental advances to trumpet, the most prominent of which was their new latex ink. Dr. Ross Allen, a senior technology specialist with HP, explained the latex inks as a scratch, smudge, and water-resistant competitor to solvent inks. They will be available on many of HP’s wide-format inkjet machines, and will require no special ventilation—an economic as well as environmental boon.
The above are only the highlights of HP’s pre-drupa announcements, and I encourage all readers who are going to drupa to check out HP’s booth and dive deeper into the advances that HP is making towards a digital world.
