Cassie Balentine

Dare to Be Different

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By Cassandra Balentine

Print providers strive to differentiate their products. One way to escape commodity pricing is to provide value-added output that others are not offering.

In addition to the personalization and short-run capabilities enabled by digital, print enhancement technologies provide special effects, including textures and raised and embossed features on a variable level. These solutions enable print providers to go beyond four- and four-color-plus-spot offerings to provide cutting-edge applications that demand attention.

As these technologies work their way into the mainstream, we expect them to make an impact. Currently, only a few vendors offer print enhancement technologies and many print providers have yet to embrace the opportunity, mainly due to market awareness and reliance on legacy print equipment.

Drive to Be Different
Digital enhancement technologies allow print providers to add value to traditional applications, improving profit potential while simultaneously opening avenues for expanded offerings.

The value print enhancement technologies bring to table—making material output more noticeable, engaging, interactive, and sensory in nature—attracts users to it. “Adding texture and foil to graphic design helps create a more dramatic, eye-catching impact,” says Kevin Abergel, VP of marketing and sales, MGI USA. “It also helps to stimulate bio chemical instinctual responses that lead people to reach out and touch the enhanced printed product. Many scientific research studies have shown that the relationship of human beings to physical objects is much deeper, richer, and meaningful than virtual objects.”

The industry is evolving and print enhancement technologies have a place in the future. “In today’s fast-paced word the print industry as we know it is changing,” says Amit Shvartz, VP of marketing, Scodix Ltd. He explains that printers understand that they need to differentiate themselves. To help achieve this, print providers offer customers additional value with options that were not previously available to short- and medium-run length jobs. “The alternative of being able to print digital foil in small quantities with variable data is unique. As a result, printers can now offer a tremendous range of options to their customers,” he offers.

Greg Gresock, worldwide director of product management, electrophotographic printing solutions, Eastman Kodak Company, print systems division, agrees, pointing out that print providers that go beyond four- and four-color-plus-spot printing and offer dimensional enhancements are able to differentiate themselves by offering attention-grabbing materials that are more visually and physically engaging.

Application Opportunity
More options lead to expanded opportunity in the digital print space. In addition, digital enhancement solutions offer the ability to upgrade traditional applications. The benefit of digital enables a cost-effective solution for short-run work as well as the ability to add variable enhancements on all run lengths without the need for dies, outsourcing, and makeready.

Shvartz suggests that print enhancement solutions can provide print providers with the ability to turn ordinary applications—like business/greeting cards, folders, book covers, brochures, labels, and packaging—into extraordinary creations. “The difference in end-product quality is so obvious that it’s easy to persuade customers of the value and the ability to increase both their business and profit margins,” he explains.

Abergel says one interesting attraction of digital enhancement is that it can be applied to many different print applications based on customer need, interest, and budget.

For example, MGI often sees its customers using the technology to help increase margins and revenues on standard commercial print applications. On the other hand, the technology also enables entry into profitable new markets, including book publishing and point-of-sale merchandising projects.

Abergel explains that with enhancement technologies, traditional finishing applications are more profitable because production costs are removed. “Likewise, the new applications increase revenue streams because in many cases, they are based upon expansion of both existing and new customers. In other words, our customers are adding dimensional texture and foil effects to products like corporate brochures and restaurant menus that never had them before.”

Gresock sees dimensional opportunities in direct mail and promotional materials, as well as publications, business communications, business cards, and specialty print solutions. “These applications are the most common because they are areas where the need for attention- grabbing printed materials are prevalent. By offering dimensional print solutions in short runs and on short turnaround schedules for items like brochures, book covers, inserts, and durable mailers, print providers are able to differentiate themselves from competitors and help their customers achieve marketing and printing goals,” he adds.

Another area for opportunity is the short-run customization approach to product segmentation. “Our digital enhancement technology can easily create a seasonal variation—like Summer or Winter; a product portfolio segmentation—for example, regular or deluxe; and a market-specific version—like English or Spanish,” says Abergel.

Drilling further into short-run customization is the opportunity for personalization through variable data publishing (VDP). “The growth in digital printing over the last ten to 15 years has in many ways been driven by variable data,” says Abergel. “We see the same phenomenon beginning to occur in digital finishing and print enhancement. Personalization and customization will be the key drivers to getting fully integrated into multi-channel communications,” he adds.

On the enterprise end, the ability of customer relationship management systems to produce segmented databases for short-run production enables many IT departments to assemble output lists that are linked as well as indexed for variable data capabilities. Abergel says MGI uses the terms variable data finishing or variable data foiling (VDF) to describe this process.

He offers a recent example where the company promoted its capabilities on the 2015 Graph Expo show directory. MGI created 20,000 cover cards with unique names and serialized numbers on each piece. “The response was remarkable, we found people sorting through the piles trying to find their own name and take the magazine home as a souvenir of their experience,” recalls Abergel.

Print providers can use enhancement technology to increase profitability by offering personalization options. “The advantages start before the job begins, when printers and finishers present multiple versions of the potential finished product at the time when they bid and quote the product,” says Abergel.

Gresock adds that variable data capabilities enable commercial printers to customize their offerings and increase profit margins by providing more targeted marketing and advertising collateral in industries like newspapers and direct mail. “When you combine VDP with dimensional print effects, printers are able to deliver extremely effective marketing collateral that is targeted, attractive, and informative to the consumer, and provides a high return on marketing investment dollars to the advertiser.”

The Technology
As providers of enhancement technologies continue to spread the word on the advantages of their solutions, it’s important to understand what makes these offerings tick. Here, we provide a technology breakdown of solutions from Eastman Kodak Company, MGI, and Scodix.

Kodak
Kodak’s NexPress technology features the ability for Intelligent Dimensional Coating as part of the Fifth Imaging Unit Solutions portfolio. It enables 3D effects for specified text and images and is one of nine available print enhancement solutions currently offered on the platform. It is available for all NexPress presses sold in the last ten years.

The Kodak NexPress Intelligent Dimensional Coating Solution is driven by Kodak NexPress Dimensional Clear Dry Ink, which is loaded into the Fifth Imaging Unit of a NexPress Press. Gresock describes Dimensional Clear Dry ink as a dry ink that creates a clear raised layer on top of a page element after fusing.

The Kodak NexPress Dimensional Coating Solution operates on the Kodak NexPress Digital Production Color Press Platform and can be implemented in several ways. In the creative design and prepress process it can be integrated through the design of textures and graphical overlays specifically to enhance underlying artwork.

It is also available through pre-loaded, pre-built textures such as pebble finish, linen, or canvas textures. These are selected as a job ticket item within the NexPress Digital Front End to enhance the printed application.

Finally, it can be implemented through coverage settings on the NexPress Digital Front End, where the Dimensional Dry ink is placed wherever CMYK inks exceed certain coverage thresholds to give a raised effect similar to thermography. “There is no need for specific design work in prepress and it is a simple job ticket selection,” says Gresock.
Dimensional printing takes place inline, maintaining press productivity while creating high-impact results that grab a reader’s attention. “The process is clean, simple to implement, and functions in a single pass on the NexPress Press. For short-run applications, the NexPress Dimensional Printing Solution is a lower cost than analog or other digital alternatives,” says Gresock.

MGI
MGI offers a growing portfolio of digital print enhancement products that center around its flagship JETvarnish 3D and iFOIL solutions. All of the integrated MGI JETvarnish 3D and iFOIL systems offer 2D spot UV coats, 3D dimensional textures, and embossed foil with VDP and customization options. The JETvarnish 3D product can be purchased and used as a stand-alone solution. The iFOIL module is an inline product that connects to the JETvarnish 3D and MGI Meteor DP Series of digital presses.

There are currently seven versions of the JETvarnish 3D and iFOIL products, and Abergel says more are on the way. The company also produces a customized version of the JETvarnish 3D and iFOIL products for Konica Minolta, an exclusive worldwide distributor of the JETvarnish 3D and iFOIL S Model Series.

MGI debuted the iFOIL T Model at the 2015 Graph Expo. It is an inline, toner-based foiling solution that integrates with the Meteor digital presses. The company also premiered the roll-fed JETvarnish and iFOIL W Models at Labelexpo in Belgium. The W is a digital print enhancement system for label production.

All of the JETvarnish and iFOIL products offer multiple coating and dimensional texture effects in a single pass with up to three foil colors applied concurrently. MGI products do not have click charges. Abergel says this means multiple passes and “exponentially greater effects can be accomplished if the customer is interested and the operator has time.”

The MGI JETvarnish and iFOIL system utilizes inkjet varnish application methods and a hot foiling process. “We have three curing methods—UV, infrared, and LED. These curing options and the ability to adjust settings for different substrates, finishing materials, and temperatures create a powerful set of tools for digital print enhancement,” says Abergel.
Additionally, the MGI JETvarnish 3D and iFOIL systems are designed with a native touchscreen software application, which includes a time and materials cost calculator so that operators and managers can estimate project delivery requirements, manage work schedules, and accurately bid and quote jobs to ensure optimal profit margins.

Abergel says the operational software of its digital embellishment system allows users to control the application of varnish and foil down to the pixel and micron levels. “A print in a standard format is all that is needed to run the system and apply the enhancements,” he explains.

The JETvarnish 3D and iFOIL system are designed to serve as print enhancement systems, not as printing presses. However, Abergel says that by using varnish as an adhesion surface, it is possible to “print foil” in a variety of ways, such as to produce personalized names, text, numbers, and images.

“Traditionally, it has been impossible to create individualized, embossed foil applications due to the high cost, time, and effort needed to produce dies. So, for a personalized, 10,000 piece print run, you would need to produce 10,000 separate dies. That is obviously not a workable solution,” observes Abergel. “With MGI VDF, every piece that comes off the line can be personalized for a separate customer name and done in embossed foil up to 200 microns high,” he concludes.

Scodix
The Scodix philosophy, according to Shvartz, is to approach each individual customer through the specific application(s) they require. For example, the Scodix UltraPro Press allows users to deploy any application needed for enhancement all in one system, whether it be Scodix foil, Scodix SPOT, Scodix Metallic, Scodix Variable Data, or Scodix Braille.
“Our objective is to provide customers with innovative applications that are cost effective, robust, and reliable. We strive to deliver enhancement capabilities that give print providers the tools they need to differentiate themselves from the competition and produce high-quality end products that could never before be achieved in short, medium, and even long runs,” says Shvartz.

Scodix solutions are based on inkjet technology with a host of innovative, proprietary, and patented technologies designed to support the use of inkjet for its range of applications.

Software is included with every Scodix solution. Further, they are designed to support any design software currently in use by its customers. “The vision is to offer the Scodix enhancement through the current tools they use,” he offers.
Shvartz says Scodix provides all digital enhancements in one solution. “We have successfully developed a unique platform that serves a range of applications, including digital embossing and digital foil.”

Enhanced Capabilities
Digital print enhancement technologies address demands to offer more attractive and engaging print solutions across a variety of print segments, including commercial printing, photographic services, and specialty print. With these tools, print providers can break out as true marketing partners.
Even with a small percentage of vendors currently serving this market worldwide, it is clear immense opportunities are on the horizon. dps

Jan2016, DPS Magazine

Shades of Gray

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By Lisa Guerriero

B&W output is an important capability for many print environments. The comparatively low cost of monochrome makes it a practical option. B&W devices—both inkjet and toner based—produce books, manuals, bank statements, checks, tax documents, direct mail, and insurance policies.

InfoTrends estimates that monochrome impressions will be at 131 billion by 2018, in its U.S. Digital Production Printing Application Forecast: 2012-2018. The report predicts publishing, promotional, and transactional applications will represent the majority of these impressions. Of these three segments, publishing will be the most stable over the next few years, according to InfoTrends.

“The primary drivers of all digital presses are the continued move to shorter run, on demand printing for applications such as book printing, training manuals, and marketing collateral. The overall B&W print market is declining each year but is significantly larger in pages produced than color,” observes Tracie Sokol, VP, marketing, enterprise services and solutions, Canon Solutions America.

Cost is a primary driver for monochrome demand. “Even as color applications are dominating the conversation about where print is headed, this fact still remains—85 percent of all print impressions in book publishing, insurance, transaction, and regulatory industries are printed in B&W. And the reason for this is quite simple—it’s more cost effective,” says Ed Wong, director, product marketing, Ricoh Americas Corp.

He adds that as long as the cost per page on monochrome printers continues to be significantly lower than the cost per page on a color printer, in his experience, businesses that do not require color for most of their print production will stick with B&W.

For applications like books and direct mail, B&W devices complement color capabilities. Print providers can produce book pages in B&W, utilize a color printer for the cover, and create B&W direct mail inserts with an outer sleeve in color. This enables the ability to offer high-quality monochrome output at lower costs with the option for color.

Vendors continue to release new devices that improve the efficiency, quality, and cost-effectiveness of B&W printing. Features including magnetic ink character recognition (MICR) and media drying systems add to the value and practicality of these devices.

“While cost is by far the main driver for the continued popularity of monochrome printing, speed and productivity are also advantages. Today, monochrome systems have a broader range of media support, improved image quality, and tighter sheet-to-sheet registration,” adds Wong.

Electrophotographic Options
Many electrophotographic devices are available for monochrome-only output.

“Since the average monochrome application is printed for an audience measured in the thousands, a good toner-based B&W device will be built with that job in mind and offer many load/unload-while-running features, which enables many hours of unattended print time,” observes John Santoli, worldwide product marketing manager, Xerox.

From text-only books to graphic-heavy mailers, toner-based devices offer ideal quality for a variety of B&W applications. Productivity is also important. Both cutsheet and continuous-feed toner devices are available to meet the speed and quality criteria.

Canon offers numerous toner-based, cutsheet B&W devices in three series—Océ VarioPrint 6000+, varioPRINT DP, and imagePRESS. For applications like books, manuals, catalogs, directories, and statements, “the print quality and speed of our devices meet or exceed the expectations of our customers and provide them with the ability to react quickly to the constantly changing information,” suggests Sokol.

The Océ VarioPrint 6000+ series presents true one-pass duplex printing digital presses. The three versions in the series each print up to 306 pages per minute (ppm), offer up to 600×1,200 dpi, and handle pages up to 12.6×19.2 inches. Transactional and MICR models are available to ensure quick transitions from printing standard duplex jobs to specialty jobs such as checks and transactional work. The varioPRINT DP series offers speeds up to 135 ppm with a smaller footprint. It handles paper up to 12.6×19.2 inches and provides resolution up to 600×2,400 dpi. The imagePRESS 1100 series prints up to 135 ppm, with feeding and finishing options to optimize productivity. It offers up to 1,200×1,200 dpi resolution and handles media up to 13×19.2 inches.

Eastman Kodak’s Digimaster HD Series features three cutsheet devices. The machines offer color with B&W capabilities, and each handles paper widths up to 14.33×18.5 inches and provides resolution up to 600×600 dpi. The Digimaster HD125 produces 125 impressions per minute (ipm) with a maximum monthly duty cycle of 4.2 million impressions, the HD150 prints 150 ipm with a duty cycle up to five million impressions per month. The HD300 offers 300 ipm with a monthly maximum of eight million impressions.

Konica Minolta provides several monochrome options within its bizhub line, each handling paper widths up to 12 inches. Offering resolutions of up to 1,200×1,200 dpi, the cutsheet devices feature speeds between 95 and 250 ppm, and monthly duty cycles between 1.5 and six million. The bizhub PRESS 2250P model is a twin engine monochrome device that handles long-run printing.

Ricoh’s Pro 8100, Pro 8110, and Pro 8120 are toner-based, cutsheet devices capable of up to a million ipm. The company built these models to accommodate longer run jobs like educational booklets while ensuring quick turnaround and document integrity. Nine paper trays, with a capacity of up to 12,650 sheets, promote longer runs with fewer interruptions.

The toner-based cutsheet printers offer maximum speeds between 95 and 135 ppm, each capable of up to 1,200×4,800 dpi resolution and handling media up to 13 inches wide. The media flexibility of the Ricoh devices enables transitions to textured, coated, or specialty stocks automatically without slowing down job flow. MICR capabilities allow for specialty jobs such as check printing.

Xerox offers several cutsheet toner options. The D95/D110/D125 copier-printers feature speeds of 95, 110, and 125 ppm, respectively. These models target consistent, high-quality reproduction of text, solids, photos, and graphics. Xerox engineered its D136 copier-printer, producing at 136 ipm, for dependability, ease of use, high-quality finishing capabilities, and optional integrated workflow optimization solutions. The Nuvera EA Production Print Systems include multiple options with speeds ranging from 100 to 314 ipm. Targeted for productivity, they feature image quality, media flexibility, and inline finishing options.

The company designed the devices for quality, and they offer either 2,400×2,400 or 4,800×600 dpi, depending on the product line. “Image quality on monochrome applications is normally measured by the amount of vibrancy in text and solid areas, and the level of smoothness in grayscale and half tones,” notes Santoli.

Inkjet Solutions
As production inkjet technologies continue to gain adoption, B&W solutions are available to meet monochrome demands.
“We live in a world where book-of-one and cover-driven book applications are no longer radical ideas and short-run printing of back list titles is a money maker for publishers. Add to that the ongoing need for short runs of notifications and other communications, and the reality becomes less about run length and more about the total volume a company has in a month,” suggests Pat McGrew, M-EDP, CMP, inkjet evangelist, HP Inkjet Web Press.

She adds that in most cases, the decision to adopt monochrome printing is cost based. This makes the move to inkjet for monochrome jobs a logical path for companies that do not have a customer base interested in color.

Improved quality combined with high speeds, ranging between 420 and 1,000 feet per minute (fpm) depending on the device, drives the use of monochrome inkjet. “Decreasing run lengths and the need to turn work more quickly both contribute to the increased adoption of digital printing. Additionally, the quality of inkjet print has significantly increased through both hardware and paper advancements,” notes Pete Georges, sales support analyst, high speed inkjet, Screen USA.

Numerous web-fed inkjet presses are available for monochrome printing, offering a variety of speeds, duty cycles, and media capabilities.

Eastman Kodak’s monochrome options include the Prosper 1000, built for customized direct mail applications and book applications. The web-fed system prints up to 650 fpm—3,600 letter-sized ppm—with a monthly duty cycle of up to 90 million impressions. It handles paper widths up to 25.5 inches.

Earlier this year the company introduced the Prosper 1000 Press Plus, featuring the same duty cycle and print widths at greater speeds, printing up to 1,000 fpm or 5,647 ppm. Both versions feature up to 600×900 dpi resolution.

HP’s PageWide Web Press family includes multiple monochrome models, each featuring print speeds of up to 800 fpm and 1,200×600 dpi. HP’s High-Definition Nozzle Architecture (HDNA) technology prevents tone breaks to ensure higher quality images, and the new HP Priming Solution enables an extensive range of standard offset coated media. “With HP Priming Solutions and HDNA technology, inkjet is no longer restricted to light-coverage, short-run work on a narrow range of media,” explains McGrew.

The HP T400 Mono Series produces up to 175 million letter-sized images per month. It has a scalable web width up to 42 inches and print width up to 41.75 inches, enabling efficient production of common formats, including 16-page signatures for book publishing. HP’s T300 Mono Series has a maximum monthly duty cycle of up to 129 million letter-sized images. It features a scalable web width of up to 30 inches and print width of up to 29.1 inches, producing signatures, full-broadsheet formats, or multiple-up documents for a range of applications.

The T260 Mono series prints up to 111 million landscape letter-sized, 123 million A4, and 211 million 6×9-inch pages per month.

Ricoh’s InfoPrint 5000 Multi-Purpose Platform monochrome solution offers continuous-feed inkjet printing up to 420 fpm and resolution up to 720×360 dpi. Designed for print service providers with a large volume of data-rich short-run jobs, it features an MICR option to enable applications like remittance coupons, statements with convenience checks, and direct mail with pre-approved checks. An extended media dryer option allows for printing on lighter- and heavier-weight inkjet and offset coated stocks. It can also be upgraded to color.

The company says it designed the device to help customers easily transition to monochrome inkjet with lower overall print per page costs. “Our goal was to offer enough versatility to meet any print shop’s needs, whether they required data variability, fast turnaround for short-run jobs, a combination of crisp B&W and sharp colors, or all of the above,” explains Wong.

Screen USA’s Truepress Jet520EX-Mono monochrome device prints up to 420 fpm—1,833 letter-sized pages ppm—and a maximum duty cycle of 24 million impressions per month. The continuous-feed printer offers a 720×360 maximum dpi. The company also has an option that allows for higher resolution printing at high speeds. New ink developments provide higher density blacks on all stocks.

B&W Toner
Nordis Direct is a full-service print provider offering everything from data processing services to direct mail and email marketing services, high-speed laser printing, letter shop services, and full-color digital printing services.

Based in Coral Springs, FL out of a 50,000-square-foot facility, the company produces a variety of applications on a range of B&W digital devices. According to Ronnie Selinger, president/CEO, Nordis Direct, the company operates several Canon Océ VarioPrint 6320+ and Konica Minolta bizhub PRESS 1250 and bizhub PRO 1200 printers.

These cutsheet toner devices produce applications such as postcards, flyers, statements, checks, coupons, and direct marketing materials. It averages 7.5 million B&W clicks per month. The typical run size for its monochrome jobs is 15,000 to 20,000 packages—30,000 to 45,000 impressions.

The company also utilizes several color devices, including two Konica Minolta C8000s, which are cutsheet toner deices, as well as two RISO cutsheet inkjet devices.

“There are times clients will have us digitally print color brochures and buck slips to become inserts that get incorporated into their mail packages where the documents are printed in B&W,” says Selinger.

Having the capability to produce both color and B&W enables the company to digitally print smaller jobs that may not make functional sense to print offset.

Monochrome Inkjet
Founded in 1973, Total Printing Systems (TPS) is a short-run digital book manufacturer based in Newton, IL. TPS provides a range of services including single to full-color printing on covers and book interiors, an in-house bindery, print on demand, fulfillment, inventory management, and warehousing services.

The company recently invested in a Screen USA Truepress Jet520EX-Monochrome inkjet device, which is used to produce books, manuals, handouts, and education materials. It produces about 16 million B&W impressions per month with typical runs sizes of 750 copies per book, with each copy averaging 200 pages.

The company acquired the Screen Truepress Jet520EX with Hunkeler finishing to address a need for higher speed, higher resolution B&W production. In order to bind the longer runs that the high-speed press offers, the company installed a Horizon CABS 4000 perfect binding line, a more automated head and tail band machine, and an automated Technograf Pronto endsheet maker.

The addition of its B&W inkjet acquisition complements an already extensive digital production line, which includes the Screen TruePress Jet520 four-color digital inkjet web press, two screen bulk ink delivery systems, a Kodak NexPress 2100 Plus, Konica Minolta C8000, Konica Minolta C1100, and two OKI Pro930 color printers.

While some of the books it produces are cover-to-cover B&W, the firm often uses the two Screen devices in conjunction. “Over half of the books we produce are black-only interiors with 4/0 covers,” says Rick Lindemann, VP, TPS. “It just doesn’t make sense to produce that kind of work on a four color-machine, where you could be printing and selling 4/4 work. So it’s cost driven more than anything,” he concludes.

Dedicated to B&W
Customers still demand B&W for an array of application requirements, from books to transactional communications.

While color can enhance output, the benefits of monochrome—low cost and quick turnaround—still meet the needs of publishing, promotional, and transactional applications. dps

Jan2016, DPS Magazine